Full Text

Steven Finacom

The Solano Stroll brought thousands to Solano Avenue. A ferris wheel anchored the
east end of the event. Marchers included a Chinese lion and dragon dancer contingent,
samba dancers, groups from local schools, fencing students, and Berkeley High School
cheerleaders. Two tiny drummers, part of the California Repercussions group, brought
up the rear.

News

Iran has released Sarah Shourd, one of three University of California at Berkeley graduates detained in the country for more than a year.

Shourd, 32, was captured in Iran on July 31, 2009, along with Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 28. The hikers' families and friends say they were detained after they accidentally crossed an unmarked border into Iran while hiking in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

Iran accused the three of espionage and said it planned to prosecute them, although no formal charges have been filed.

Shourd's mother, Oakland resident Nora Shourd, said last month she was concerned about her daughter's health because her daughter told her that she discovered a lump on her breast.

The official Islamic Republic News Agency said the judge in thecae decided to allow Shourd to be released on $500,000 bail "because of her ailment," but said the arrest warrant for Bauer and Fattal has been extended for an extra two months.

The families of the three hikers released a statement in response to the news that Shourd would be coming home.

"All of our families are relieved and overjoyed that Sarah has atlas been released but we're also heartbroken that Shane and Josh are still being denied their freedom for no just cause," the statement read.

Nora Shourd said in a separate statement, "I've hoped and prayed for this moment for 410 days and I cannot wait to wrap Sarah in my arms handhold her close when we are finally together again."

The White House released a statement from President Obama this morning lauding Shourd's release but calling on Iran to release the other two hikers.

"We salute the courage and strength of the Shourd, Bauer, and Fattal families, who have endured the unimaginable absence of their loved ones," Obama said. "We have gained strength from their resolve and will continue to do everything we can to secure the release of their loved ones."

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said, "I have long argued that the detainment of these three young American citizens is illegitimate and contrary to a basic respect for human rights.

"As we look forward to welcoming Sarah home, we must acknowledge that this tragedy will not be resolved until she is joined by her friends...who remain unfairly imprisoned and separated from the outside world," Lee said.

U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s hubby Richard Blum has bought more than a million dollars worth of stock in UC Berkeley professor and federal-sponsored agrofuel scientist Jay Keasling’s Amyris Technologies, reports The Hill.

That makes the powerful Democrat a business partner of Bill Gates, who provided the funding Keasling used to launch his company, which was originally billed as a firm that would use genetically modified bacteria to produce anti-malarial drugs.

Amyris, once headquartered in Berkeley, has been commercially repurposed as a company that seeks to use GMO technology to produce agrofuels, transforming plants into transportation fuels.

The company’s CEO, John Melo, came to Amyris from an outfit formerly known as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company and better known today as BP.

Keasling was a lead player in UC Berkeley’s successful bid to win a $500 million agrofuel development grant from BP, and he’s done well by Melo, who was rewarded with a compensation package of $829,950 last year despite the company’s losses of $120.4 million over the last three years, according to Green Energy Reporter.

Amyris also shares the same building with another Keasling-headed agrofuel venture, the federally funded Joint Bioenergy Institute [JBEI] which operates out of the fourth floor of the building where Amyris occupies the ground floor, making an easy commute for Keasling between his public and private operations.

While JBEI is entirely federally funded, Amyris is also tapping into the public purse, landing a $25 million grant in December, as Josh Richman reported for the Bay Area News Group’s Political Blotter:

Emeryville-based Amyris Biotechnologies Inc. will get a $25 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for a pilot plant producing renewable fuel – a diesel substitute – by fermenting sweet sorghum.The Energy Department doled out $564 million last week to 19 such bio-refinery projects nationwide; Amyris was the only Bay Area recipient. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack hope the projects will help lay a foundation for full commercial-scale development of a U.S. biomass industry, reducing the nation’s foreign-oil dependence while creating jobs.

Amyris’ plant will also be able to co-produce lubricants, polymers and other petro-chemical susbstitutes. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said the plant “would create approximately 75 new jobs in the area and propel Amyris’ cutting-edge renewable fuel technology.

Feinstein ranks in tenth place on The Hill’s list of rich federal lawmakers, most of whom managed to boost their wealth while the rest of us were getting poorer, report Kevin Bogardus and Barbra Kim.

In Washington, six senators from both parties introduced legislation to reduce the ethanol tariff from 54 cents per gallon to 45 cents, to achieve parity with the recent reduction in the ethanol blender’s credit. The blender credit for first-generation fuels was reduced from 51 cents to 45 cents. One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Diane Feinstein, said that the high ethanol tariff limits Brazilian ethanol imports and encourages the use of gasoline. Feinstein (D-CA), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Susan Collins (R-ME), Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Mel Martinez (R-FL.) are sponsors of the bill.

Things get interesting when you realize that Amyris has launched a major effort in Brazil to use its technology to transform sugar cane into ethanol and from there into other fuels.

Amyris Brasil is expanding our production capacity by working with Brasilian sugar and ethanol producers to produce Amyris fuels and chemicals through a “capital light” production model. Under this model, these producers will invest a substantial portion or all of the capital needed to build the Amyris facility for production of our renewable products while Amyris will provide technology, plant designs and technical expertise. Amyris Brasil will then market and distribute the products to end customers. Our first such arrangement is our joint venture with Usina São Martinho. The joint venture, SMA Indústria Química S.A., was created to build the first facility in Brasil fully dedicated to the production of Amyris renewable products.

In December the company signed an $82 million agreement to buy a 40 percent share in a Brazilian sugar cane mill, according to Reuters.

Paris-based oil and gas major Total has invested an undisclosed amount for a 17 percent stake in second generation biofuel developer Amyris. - The investment makes Total Amyris’s largest shareholder, ahead of Khosla Ventures, which has a 15.4 percent stake. Other investors include Texas Pacific Group and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Since its 2003 launch, Amyris has raised around $165 million.Amyris, using a process developed at the University of California Berkeley, has created a sugar-based hydrocarbon molecules that can be converted into greener jet fuel, industrial chemicals or biodiesel.

In a press release issued yesterday Total and Amyris said they planned to jointly-develop and commercialize renewable fuels and chemicals. Although based in Emeryville, Calif., Amyris does a bulk of its R&D work in Brazil.

>snip<

Last spring Amyris filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) that seeks to raise about $100 million. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are lead underwriters.

Another major league backer of Amyris is Vinod Khosla, one of the leading sources of green venture capital. National Review blogger Greg Pollowitz offers this quote from the billionaire: “When I met them they were working on malaria drugs,” he said of Amyris’ founders. “Six months later the same genetically engineered bugs were producing diesel.”

According to a 13 May 2008 National Review post by Noel Sheppard, another Amyris investor was Al Gore.

And for another look at Blum profits from government, see this choice bit about his role as a buyer of foreclosed properties.

When I first saw the news of the gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno on September 9, 2010 it seemed very close to home.

I grew up a couple of miles away from there, but the home I thought of first was my current Berkeley residence and an eerily similar situation that had played out along my block, fortunately without disastrous consequences, several years ago.

Several of us smelled gas along our south central Berkeley block. The smell was faint and seemed to come and go but we smelled it frequently enough that it became a topic of sidewalk conversation. People checked around their homes and couldn’t find anything amiss. The smell was always outside along the street, not near the houses.

We called PG & E and workers came to investigate with little hand held devices that “sniffed” up and down the cracked pavement (the street has since been repaved). Eventually, larger crews came and started trenching. They dug up much of the center of the street.

It was then we learned that a large gas pipeline servicing southeast Berkeley ran up the middle of our east / west block. It was buried several feet deep. The trench was impressive, especially as the crews kept extending it along the block exposing more and more of the pipe as they looked for the exact source of the elusive leak.

My recollection is that the workers said it was either a 16 or 19 inch diameter pipe. That’s not much more than half the size of the one that blew up in San Bruno but it still seemed a shocking size for a Berkeley residential street. None of us had known previously what was buried under our pavement.

Eventually the crews found something. I think it was a small crack or seam through which gas had seeped out and into the soil above, eventually reaching the pavement and open air. It was repaired, the trench was filled in, and the excavation repaved.

I don’t remember any formal communication to the neighbors from PG & E during this event. Everything we heard came from conversations with the workers who were doing the actual investigation and repairs.

Today, I imagine, PG & E workers and contractors would probably be warned not to say anything to the neighbors, and some official spokesperson might appear with soothing words.

Our block, in retrospect, was fortunate. Our incident came and passed in almost a routine manner. But the explosion in San Bruno and the resulting deaths and devastating fire there should be a caution to us all.

Reportedly it took hours to shut off the gas fueling the enormous blowtorch that incinerated part of the Crestmoor neighborhood and kept firefighters back from the center of the explosion area. And, also reportedly, residents of the area had smelled gas outside, just as we did, and wondered where it was coming from.

San Bruno is a relatively suburban city. Most of the homes are smaller single family structures spaced out along wide streets. The area where the blast and fire occurred also had a fair amount of undeveloped open space separating the residential blocks from adjacent areas.

Berkeley, in contrast, is a very densely built city. A similar explosion on a Berkeley block affecting a similar area might burn or damage scores of buildings and hundreds of housing units and spread for blocks across narrow streets where the buildings are closely spaced.

It was reported this week that PG & E has been ordered to inspect its enormous network of natural gas pipelines in California. Authorities in Berkeley should be vitally interested in this work.

Berkeley has experienced at least one fatal gas leak and explosion in the past. December 4, 1931, an abandoned residential gas line left over from, and forgotten after, the 1923 Berkeley Fire began to leak and filled a newer house at 2600 Cedar Street with gas. The Berkeley Fire Department responded and a crowd gathered on the adjacent streets, attracted by the fire engines. A huge explosion killed one fireman and a 16 year old spectator, and seriously injured many others, including more than a dozen firemen and Chief George Haggerty and numerous children. The house and two fire trucks were wrecked and debris was thrown hundreds of feet, damaging houses blocks away

Fortunately, there was no fire, probably because the force of the blast blew out any flames and the little residential gas line was itself too small to re-ignite the area.

To avoid disasters similar to that in San Bruno, at the least, the City of Berkeley should know—or should find out—the following:

- Where are the larger gas mains that run through Berkeley and what are their capacities? There may be one down your street, just as we found there was one in ours. *

- The age, status, condition, and PG & E inspection and repair schedule for those mains.

- Emergency procedures for dealing with a gas explosion and fire of this type.

- PG & E procedures for shutting off the supply to larger gas mains in the event of a leak or fire. Why the main in San Bruno burned so long is the most troubling question for me to come out of this disaster.

In the meantime, if you smell tell-tale gas outside, call PG & E. If they are not of assistance, I would suggest calling the Berkeley Fire Department or the Department of Public Works to ask what they advise. For a time at least, before the inevitable fading of disaster memories, people and agencies may be attentive to this issue.

Police in Berkeley are asking for the public's help identifying a suspect who shot and killed a man walking home with his fiancee after a party in the city early Sunday morning.

An Associated Press report in the San Jose Mercury News said that the victim was a 35-year-old Chilean man who had moved to California to be with his American-born fiancee.

Berkeley police officer Jamie Perkins told the AP that Adolfo Ignacio Celedon was shot several times as he and his girlfriend, a UC Berkeley graduate student, were walking home from a party early Sunday, which was his birthday. He died in a hospital later that day.

The couple were walking near Adeline and Emerson streets at around 3:40 a.m. when they were approached by two male suspects who tried to rob them, Berkeley police spokeswoman Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said earlier,

During the crime, one of the suspects shot the victim and punched the victim's fiancee. The woman suffered minor injuries.

The victim, who had reportedly moved to Berkeley in February, was taken to a trauma center by fire department paramedics.

The suspects got into a two-tone older model sport utility vehicle and drove away, traveling west on Ashby Avenue.

Police did not release the victim's name to the local press pending notification of his family and confirmation of his identity by the Alameda County coroner's bureau.

The Berkeley Police Department is urging anyone who might have knowledge of the homicide or the suspects to contact the police homicide unit at (510) 981-5741 or the 24-hour police non-emergency number (510) 981-5900. Calls can be made anonymously at (800) 222-TIPS.

The Solano Stroll brought thousands to Solano Avenue. A ferris wheel anchored the
east end of the event. Marchers included a Chinese lion and dragon dancer contingent,
samba dancers, groups from local schools, fencing students, and Berkeley High School
cheerleaders. Two tiny drummers, part of the California Repercussions group, brought
up the rear.

Cheerleaders, fire engines, bicycle police, electric go carts, bands, fencers, gymnasts, samba dancers, and assorted local politicians marched, danced, or rolled their way down Solano Avenue in the traditional parade that kicked off the Solano Stroll on Sunday, September 12.

It was the 36th year of the annual event. The 2010 iteration was entitled “A Global A-Faire”. The Stroll is hosted by the Solano Avenue Merchants Association.

A mile of the Avenue running through Berkeley and Albany, closed to traffic for the day, was lined with scores of booths of non-profit organizations, craft sellers, local businesses, and cultural and activity groups.

The thousands who showed up could get a slice of Zachary’s pizza, ride a ferris wheel, buy a historic postcard, or find out about the myriad community groups and causes in the area.

During my years of teaching writing, and long afterward, writers would ask me for advice on or reaction to their work. What most of them were really asking for was publishing contacts, and, when I honestly said I couldn’t help, they didn’t believe me. Even those who were more concerned about the writing itself believed that the stamp of quality on their work must be, could only be, its appearance in print by a commercial publisher. They were deaf to my insistence that writing is art and publishing is business; that 99% of commercial publishing is like dropping a book over a cliff, lost and forgotten in record time; that they were aware only of the 1% that became best sellers and movies—never a reliable measure of the quality of the art.

I usually ended my unheeded speech with an equally unheeded exhortation: you want a generation of readers who will treasure your writing? Who will pass it on, quote it, keep it in print? Then write your life for your children. No children? Then write for your cousins’ children or your neighbors’ grandchildren—for the next generation and the next, who will prize it even more. You want immortality? There it is.

As I got warmed up, I would tell how often I wished I had listened to my grandmother’s stories of crossing the Atlantic with her ten-year-old son, both of them without a word of English, trying to find their way to Butte, Montana to join my grandfather, already coughing after a few years’ work in the copper mines. But, when I was ten, my grandmother’s stories were boring, old-country, un-American. And by the time I had grown up enough to value her stories, she was dead. I would conclude my harangue by urging my writing students to start—NOW—to put down memories of their daily lives, to question older living relatives or neighbors before it was too late, to get this precious literature down on paper.

I am still nagging writers with this advice. Many now agree, and some have even joined writing groups for encouragement. But few write much, and those few spend too much time polishing up successive drafts. They may also be discouraged by a self-imposed requirement that they organize, outline, get their recollections in chronological order—a “proper” autobiography. But that’s not the way memories work. They fall on us like leaves from here and there, blown by sudden breezes, from one direction, then another, from something that happened last week, which evokes a sudden memory from when we were three years old. which leads to remembering some valuable advice given by the one high school classmate we detested. Does it matter if these memories don’t come in chronological order?

So get a notebook and write them as they come. (Even your penmanship might be an interesting artifact to a descendent.) Record your first memory; your worst memory; the happiest incident; the most frightening; the most boring; the best lesson you ever learned; the best teacher; the worst; a stupid, shameful thing you did, a portrait of a close relative you hate. Something you saw and did that no one can do or see now. (It was unimportant? That might make it especially interesting to your grand-nephew.) One short memory written down in twenty minutes will nudge another one forward—and everyone can spare twenty minutes a day for posterity.

As I typed that last sentence, Bob looked over my shoulder and said, “Right, even you. With all your years of writing, you’ve sneaked a few experiences into your fiction, but if they weren’t “usable” you didn’t write them down anywhere for the next or the next generation.” He’s right. So, I’ll set an example with a few unimportant experiences.

I learned to swim in Fleishhacker Pool, an Olympic-size outdoor swimming pool, water pumped in from the ocean, next to the San Francisco Zoo. Long gone, of course, because, well, whose brilliant idea was it to build an outdoor pool near SF Ocean Beach, where the summer temperature might hit the high fifties on a REALLY warm day? I also took a life-saving class there from Charlie Sava, trainer of once-famous swimmer Ann Curtis, and learned how to get in and out of a life-saving canoe, in the water, an exercise that, as I remember, left me black and blue from head to foot. I also swam at the legendary Sutro Baths, the elegant, glassed-in palace of pools set halfway out into the Pacific on rocks at the northwest tip of San Francisco (you can still look down on what’s left of concrete pool rims). Sutro Baths was near to closing when I swam there, and the wooden walkways around the pools were rotting, moldy and smelly, but I wish the City had taken over what had become a white elephant and fixed it up—before a suspicious fire finally destroyed it.

Like many people, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing—fretting over my divorce—when the assassination of John Kennedy came over the radio to remind me that there were more important things in the world than my own guilty misery. I also remember my 3rd grade teacher, even her name, Miss McLeod, one of those much-maligned old-maid schoolteachers, who happened to be a gifted puppeteer. The rear of our classroom was a marionette theater. We each made our own marionette to act the part we memorized and spoke as we manipulated the marionette; the high point of my life was creating and playing Snow White in our class production, attended by every class in the then-Le Conte School of the SF Mission District. We certainly learned the reading and math expected for our grade level, but I remember only the creative joy of our marionette theater.

I remember growing up in a San Francisco of parades on all holidays, including Hallowe’en. One Hallowe’en night, our next-door neighbors insisted that both families pull out all our sheets, dress up as ghosts, and walk up (less than a mile) to Market Street to join the parade. (Mothers and children only; my father worked late, and the father next door was drunk, as usual.) We marched, ten abreast, a row of white-sheeted ghosts, in the huge mob of ordinary folks that stretched all along Market Street. No police in sight. No drunkenness, no brawling, no danger. All perfectly safe fun, marching down Market Street, then walking home in the dark.

There are sadder memories, angry memories of hurt and betrayal, just like the ones everyone has. Don’t leave anything out; that’s the blessing of limited, selective publication. Yours may be a vital side of a picture your readers deserve to see whole.

This is not just an old geezer’s game. If you’re sixty, you can remember the mudflat, scrap sculpture in the tidelands before the Eastshore Freeway was built. If you’re under fifty, you can drive out to the Albany Bulb and document the scrap sculpture left from industrial dump days there. (If you’re new to California, you have even richer comparisons of sights and customs to document.) Under forty? Describe what pre-internet schooldays were like. Under thirty?—your first time behind the wheel of a car, which car? Under twenty? your first great passion: sexual, artistic, sports, exploratory. Or your first great loss.

Okay, now, let’s all get at it. Twenty minutes a day, a precious treasure for the next generation.

There will be fun, food and great company! Also, come get your lawn sign and help walk some precincts after the event!

Over the past year and half, Councilmember Jesse Arreguín has been a strong progressive voice on the Berkeley City Council, standing up and spea...king out for progressive change. He has authored legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights, a just immigration policy, affordable housing, the environment, UC accountability and workers rights.

He has also used his office as a platform to advocate for social change and not only talks the talk but also walks the walk, walking in picket lines and getting arrested for political causes.

As a lifetime activist, Jesse has been an outspoken progressive voice and has never been afraid to stand up for what is right. From an early age, Jesse has been passionately committed to fighting for social change. At the age of 9, Jesse became active in the campaign to rename a street in San Francisco after his hero, Cesar Chavez. For the past fifteen years, Jesse has been involved in political advocacy and bring his years of experience as an activist, city commissioner, City Council aide and elected official to the City Council.

The following blow-torch comment is typical: "...but for the bums who insist on having their drugs and booze handy at all times, screw 'em--let them sleep on concrete or, better still, run them out of town."

People's Park, always the eye of a hurricane, has become a political hot-potato in the November elections for the district 7 council seat.

Two of the candidates' stated positions would bring sweeping changes to the troubled park and adjacent neighborhoods. Although couched in code, like "multi-use," and even "soccer field," such proposals sound suspiciously like "run them out of town."

As a Berkeleyan living a half block from the park for 30 years, I walk through or around the park daily. Thirty years of personal experience with the park, plus informal interviews with former park activists, park users, and park neighbors have emboldened me to speak out.

I say "emboldened," not so much as pose, but to suggest that saying anything about People's Park is sure to bumble on someone's toes.

By the early Nineteen 70s, the park site had become a dusty pit. And too hot to handle.

It then stewed and percolated until a committed group of park activists donated thousands of hours of landscaping to create a tropical outer periphery.

Restrooms and a custodian's office followed. Dust became lawn, and it all seemed good. A children's playground was added. A basketball court proved popular.

But a volley-ball sand pit and nets were wildly unpopular. Protests led directly to the removal of the sand pits and nets. They were replaced by a grassy meadow.

Perhaps volleyball courts were seen as too reminiscent of the playing field that had sparked riots in '69, which led to a National Guard occupation of Berkeley, a death, a blinding, and injuries to 128.

Note that District 7 candidate, George Beier, proposes to construct a soccer field in the park. Note it in context with the park's bloody history!

From its beginnings the park has been haunted by violence, surveillance, and suspicion. No one is really "shocked" that inter-park skirmishes break out regularly.

I see troubled interactions in the park so often that I barely notice; although I would have certainly noticed, had I been there, the incidents of violence, assault, and intimidation of park workers as reported Aug. 30 in the Daily Cal.

Many of my friends who donated the thousands of hours of landscaping that gives the park the look we now know, have soured on the park.

The park, formerly well within its own borders, has spilled into adjoining streets, like mine. By day and night, Hillegass and Regent have become a People's Park annex where unwanted items are abandoned and business, arguments, and fights are conducted.

Often, a narrow strip running from Hillegass to Regent on Dwight Way is filled with shopping carts stuffed sky-high, mattresses, books, bottles, blankets, and moldy food.

Regulars, barred from the park at night, camp up and down Hillegass and Regent. Mostly, this arrangement, uncomfortable for everyone, is barely tolerable. But it may not always be tolerable at all.

Especially if changes to the park leave regular users nowhere else to go. Make no mistake, they will not leave town, nor will they ever opt out of a migration going back at least to the sixties.

Would Willard park neighbors take an outpouring from People's Park in their backyards?

While candidates Beier and Cecelia Rosales bellow change, incumbent Kriss Worthington continues working with university committees and city agencies to improve the park and neighborhoods.

Fourteen years of negotiating with the University, may be keeping Worthington from airing half-baked proposals. He may know better.

As national politics amply shows, proposals for change are not the same as actual results. Changes in the park have occurred slowly, and fitfully. Typically, in response to or initiated by public action.

Changed ordinances, a Beier goal, depend on enforcement.

But the city's outside smoking ordinance is not enforced. Know anyone who has been ticketed for cell-phoning while driving? Or drunk and disorderly and blocking walks... while smoking?

In the meantime, residents of bordering neighborhoods are turning against the park, as my own findings and the Daily Cal's Peoples Park posted comments confirm.

The cauldron that is the park continues to boil.

Perhaps we've moved beyond the "can't we all get along here?" to "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Ted Friedman, a 40 year Berkeley resident, has lived 30 years a half block from People's Park.

BERKELEY—Berkeley residents are invited to join the tens of thousands of California volunteers who will help clean up our local beaches, bays, and waterways during this year’s Coastal CleanUp Day, September 25.

The California Coastal Commission is working to make California Coastal Cleanup Day even "greener." What does this mean? The Cleanup brings out tens of thousands of Californians who remove more than a million pounds of debris from our beaches, rivers, creeks, lakes, and waterways - so, the net environmental impact of the event is tremendously positive. However, the event itself has an environmental footprint.

For example, in 2009, Coastal Cleanup Day volunteers used more than 130,000 plastic bags and 135,000 plastic gloves during Coastal Cleanup Day. Cleanup sites held barbeques, lunches or snacks for volunteers, and many of these generated additional packaging and food-related waste. Thousands of volunteers drove cars to their cleanup sites around the state.

The Coastal Commission is committed to reducing the environmental footprint of Coastal Cleanup Day, but we need your help to do so! Please join our efforts this year by turning out to the Cleanup with a "Bring Your Own" philosophy. Here's some quick tips on what you can do:

· Bring a bucket or reusable bag to the Cleanup for collecting trash (most Cleanup sites are equipped with dumpsters or roll-away bins so you can dump what you collect and bring your bucket or reusable bag back home).

· Bring a lightweight pair of gardening gloves from home, instead of using the disposable plastic gloves we provide.

· Bring a filled, reusable water bottle to the Cleanup.

· Use public transportation, bike, or carpool to your Cleanup. Use the pedestrian overpass and the Bay Trail to reach the staging area and the many locations we will be cleaning, or take the 51B bus to University Ave. and Frontage Rd.

Volunteers help compile data about garbage for the largest research project in the world. The data that is collected is used to change laws and to educate people about how to be conscientious consumers.

New- SF Estuary Partnership Sponsored Pharmaceutical take back . Bring your expired, unused and unwanted pharmaceuticals for recycling and keep them out of our waterways. No controlled substances will be accepted.

Only groups of 10 or more need to preregister by calling 510-981-6720.

At the end of the Cleanup, when you return the filled out data card, you will get a raffle ticket for some great prizes.

ü Meet behind the Sea Breeze Market and Deli on the corner of West Frontage Rd. and University Ave. in Berkeley.

Other Locations: If you are interested in cleaning up the Emeryville shoreline, show up at the Firehouse on Powell St. at 9:00 a.m. For Albany, go to Albany Beach at the foot of Buchanan St. in Albany at 8:30 a.m.

Opinion

Editorials

Of course, since it’s a spunky city full of contentious people, any time that soubriquet is quoted, someone will pop up to say “Does Not!” Also true.

But in all the years I’ve been visiting Chicago, going way back to childhood trips from St.Louis, it’s always been an impressive, vital city, full of beautiful buildings, dynamic museums, lavish parks, and yes, those scrappy citizens.

My knowledge of historic Chicago comes from a long line of gritty fiction by the likes of Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow. My main source for background on the down and dirty side of latter-day Chicago politics has been the stories written by Sara Paretsky about V.I. Warshawski, a tough-gal private eye who’s half-Italian, half-Polish—and the feisty half of both. Paretsky’s tales of V.I.’s adventures spotlight how Chicago really works, with the villains the mobsters, developers and politicians (and some who are all three) whose fingerprints are found on many a civic project.

And yet, Chicago, warts and all, has mostly worked, in its own way.

Years ago, a friend who lived in that city told me a quintessential Chicago story. His motor scooter was parked on the street outside his apartment. A driver ran into it, and totaled it.

A woman who witnessed the accident called the police, who took his license number and that of the car which hit the scooter. Then they called him and asked how much it was worth (then about 200 bucks.)

An hour or so later a police officer knocked on his door, and when he opened it handed him 200 dollars in small bills “for your accident”. Case closed. Presumably the policeman pocketed a healthy cut of the proceeds, and a rude form of justice was served.

A recent weekend in Chicago has persuaded me that it’s a bit unfair to call the loose organization that controls politics around here a “machine”. That’s actually too generous, because a machine at least takes care of its wardheelers.

I went for the birthday party of a friend, a retired labor organizer whose union protégés were featured in a recent Michael Moore movie where they took over their factory when owners threatened to move operations offshore.

She lives in a Northside neighborhood of leafy streets lined with three story brick apartment buildings with one spacious turn-of-the-last-century flat on each floor and colorful gardens in front and back. I was billeted with one of her old Movement friends from the sixties, who lives in a single-family house not far away which she said had been bought for about $80,000 not too many years ago.

Despite the verdant atmosphere of Midwestern late summer, it’s a distinctly urban environment, with supermarkets, farmer’s markets, public transit and every other kind of city amenity within easy walking distance. The weekend I was there happened to coincide with the annual block party on the street where I was staying, also green and leafy , which has many young families in the older houses and ambitious flower displays replacing what used to be lawns in front. The ends of her street were blocked off with cars, and many families had lawn chairs, picnic tables and even barbecues set out on the sidewalk.

The kids were out in force. My hostess, a retired English prof now enjoying a new career as a landscape gardener, called them the “river of children”—they streamed up and down the block with enormous enthusiasm. They rode their bikes in the street, having races and doing wheelies, until almost midnight in the warm evening.

The alderman for the district happened to live on her block. Aldermen in Chicago are like councilmembers in Berkeley, except that there are 50 of them, so no individual has too much power on his or her own. This one held court outside his house with his family for most of the day and night, drinking cold beer and chatting with his constituents. As the night went on, his favorite refrains were repeated more and more often, his signature quote being “I’ve had to fight block-by-block to downzone this ward!”

And therein lies the difference. An old-school big city organization—or machine, if you will—takes care of its own. Just as in many places, Developer Democrats call the tune in downtown Chicago, but in the neighborhoods it’s what the residents think they need that counts. That’s what keeps it a yes—liveable—city (much abused and misspelled though that word has been around here).

Down-zoning in this Chicago ward has meant three-story height limits, and it is credited with preserving the human scale that makes all the difference. It’s what’s kept families from fleeing to the suburbs, since there’s still room and sunlight for trees and gardens even on small city lots and even for apartment dwellers.

Residents might get a bit of argument on the exact number three from urban visionaries like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, but both agreed on the concept. The latter was willing to allow four stories, but that’s about it.

A famous section of his seminal book A Pattern Language was headed “There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.” It went on to say that “High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.”

The people in this Chicago neighborhood evidently agree with Christopher Alexander, and their alderman takes care of the zoning for them, because that’s his job. Calling a political organization a machine sounds pejorative, but what we’ve ended up with in Berkeley doesn’t even work as well as Chicago does, because the citizens are consistently shortchanged when the goodies are handed out. We’d be better off with a real machine.

The current majority members of the Berkeley City Council seem to have missed the memo.

Measure R, placed on the ballot for November by the majority of the incumbent Berkeley councilmembers, is a flagrant example of what’s wrong. It’s the worst kind of greenwashing, asking the voters to give the mayor and his cronies a blank check to create whatever kind of plan they want for the center of Berkeley, complete with high buildings which only produce speculative gains for banks and land owners. It’s developers in the saddle, citizens be damned.

Two incumbent Berkeley councilmembers now up for re-election, Kriss Worthington and Jesse Arreguin, have respected the opinions and needs of the downtown dwellers they’re supposed to represent and deserve to continue in office. They oppose Measure R.

But two others, University of California retirees Gordon Wozniak and Linda Maio, have paid little attention to the needs of their constituents. They’ve endorsed Measure R, as well as endorsing the various shills who have been put up by the Mayor’s organization in the attempt to defeat independent progressives Worthington and Arreguin.

Wozniak’s and Maio’s former employer is the major landowner in downtown Berkeley, and as such stands to benefit from Measure R both directly and indirectly. Wozniak has two viable independent challengers, Stewart Jones and Jacquelyn McCormick, either one of whom would do more than Wozniak’s done for District 8 and the city as a whole.

There are two strong challengers to Maio as well (the third seems to be keeping a low profile). Jasper Kingeter, whom I met for the first time over the weekend, displays a grasp of the key issues in his district which is remarkable for someone of his age (22) or any age. Merrilie Mitchell has made it her avocation for many years to keep up with important city issues, almost more than anyone in Berkeley.

Either of them would make an excellent replacement councilperson in District 1, and so we’re endorsing both of them. If you live in District 1, you can decide which to rank as number one, but make the other one number two, and skip the number three slot altogether.

One more warning: endorsements from the local machine and its tributary organizations are now flooding the mails, both snail and electronic. There’s even a rumor that one of the Democratic clubs, the one dominated largely by survivors of the Old less-democratic (small-d) Left, allowed the ballot counters to take the endorsement ballot box home overnight while the count was still in progress, something they’d never get away with in Chicago.

My first political job was as a Democratic precinct captain in Ann Arbor. I was trained by someone who had worked in Chicago’s Hyde Park, and she knew how elections could be stolen. On election day she would lie down on the floor on her back and wiggle underneath the mechanical voting machine to see if it had been rigged, outraging the genteel Ann Arbor Republican ladies who couldn’t even imagine such a thing.

I’m not exactly saying that club officers here (or any other endorsers) rig their counts—I have no way of knowing that. But they should all avoid even the appearance of impropriety if they want voters to take them seriously, and even that might not be enough if they're consistently suckered into acting as the tools of the dominant financial interest when they endorse candidates.

Public Comment

Please understand that any distortion of the Bible where parts of the bible are picked out and place to suit the religion is not biblical. That is exactly what the Koran does. The Bible has specific warnings against the adding, subtracting or changing the Bible which is clearly what the writer of the Koran has done. ( Revelation 22:18,19, Deuteronomy 4:2 ) The Koran specifically denies Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Unlike the Torah which is part of the Christian Bible.

Please be correct in your article when you try to link the Koran and the Bible. The Koran is clearly using some of the Biblical words but picks and chooses what to put in clearly distorting Bible. Primarily the denial of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and that He is God.

Where burning the Koran is disrespectful to those who believe in the Koran, however those Muslim believers in Afghanistan cannot make any complaints about Koran burning in The U.S. because they burn Christian Bibles and our American troops cannot have a Bible of their own. Why then can they be intolerant of Christianity and then complain when other people want to do the same thing to their religion.

Furthermore, if we stop to utilize our freedom because of Islamic radical threats and violent behavior then they have power over us. We need to show then they have no power over us.

Milagros Perez

Throwing in the reality towel

It's been tough giving up my idealism, my underlying hope that the world can be made a better place if we just stay active and convince others to believe in and work for economic, social, and political justice. Even though there appears to be no perfect or near-perfect society on earth, it always seemed rational to believe that there is no reason why there can't be such a place. I was 14 when JFK was elected, and it was easy to believe that the world really could change for the better. How wonderful that feeling of hope was, and going off to the Peace Corps when I graduated from college reinforced my outlook that I could be part of that change. When Reagan was elected and the 1980's turned into a nightmare of wars and social injustice, I worked hard to change our country's policies at home and abroad. As bad as things looked, there still seemed to be a corner our country could turn to get on a better track. I think that may have been the last time I entertained any such optimism. The 8 years of George W. made me realize that there are simply too many Americans who fundamentally do not believe in the same things I do.

Evolution? Hogwash. God? Everywhere. Climate change? A conspiracy of radical scientists out to dupe us. The scientific method? Out the window.

The night Barack Obama was elected was a wonderful respite, a breath of fresh air after a near lifetime submerged in the pollution of greed and ignorance. Hope at last? Oh, how we wished it were so. But nearly two years later it is now clear that that hope was tragically transient. In these 20 months the world seems to have been turned back upside down. What has seemed perfectly clear, rational, and just is portrayed as the opposite by a Congress and media that seem absurdly Republican-influenced. The fact that Republican obstructionism in Congress can and might lead to Republicans gaining a majority in the next election is mind boggling. 1 + 1 now equals 3.

With such denial by so many people that what is right in front of our eyes is not really there, how can my generation of activists hold out hope any longer?

With fervor I want this not to be true. Please Berkeley Planet readers, lead me back onto the path of hope. There must be a way.

Mal Singer

Correction

In reading your 8/17 reader commentary by Richard Thompson titled, "The Unreported Consequences of New Trends in Graduate Education," I came across a factual error regarding Applied Materials. The last paragraph references a recent announcement that the headquarters of Applied Materials being moved to China, when in fact, this is not the case. Applied Materials, Inc. remains headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. While we do have an R&D facility in China, in addition to R&D facilities across the globe and here in Silicon Valley, our headquarters has not moved.

Amaya WiegertMedia Relations, Corporate Affairs | Applied Materials

Social Security

Seventy-five years ago this month, during the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law one of the most significant pieces of legislation in American history: The Social Security Act of 1935. Not only did it create a government insurance program to provide incomes for seniors, it also set up a national unemployment-insurance program and provided aid to the children of widows and single mothers. Social Security was as controversial in its time as health care reform is today. Social Security was strongly opposed by the Republican Party and the mainstream business community who predicted that it would bankrupt the country and condemned it as a "compulsory socialist tax." The GOP candidate for president at that time called Social Security a "fraud on the working man." Some things never change. The GOP and Tea Party Republicans of 2010 are saying the same things, and some of these politicians even want to dismantle this long-standing and successful government program. Today, Social Security is a fundamental component of the nation's social contract. The lesson of Social Security at 75 is clear: Government programs that can rectify the imbalances of unbridled corporate greed are good for all Americans.

Ron Lowe

Mosque

Building a mosque (or Islamic cultural center) near Ground Zero is a brilliant, Gandhian gesture, and one which all people of faith and conscience should embrace.

Remember Gandhi’s, “I know a way out of hell” speech? A Hindu confronts Gandhi and confesses that after his son was killed in a Hindu-Muslim confrontation he wantonly killed a young Muslim boy. “I’m going to hell for this,” he tells Gandhi.

“I know a way out of hell,” Gandhi replies. “Find a Muslim orphan, about your son’s age, and raise him as your own….except raise him as a Muslim.”

In other word, the way “out of hell” is to live your life by God’s principles; dogma is much less important than the actions you take on behalf of humanity.

Permitting a “mosque” to be built near ground zero signifies that a) Islam did not cause the 9/11 bombings any more than Christianity caused Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma federal building; b) religious tolerance is a prerequisite to surviving in our multinational society; and c) that we as a people know how to look towards the future not the past.

If we care so much about the people whose loved ones perished at ground zero, let’s get them the best medical care in America, let’s compensate them for their losses, and let’s do our best to make sure their children can grow up in a world without oppression or terror. Building the mosque is a gesture in the right direction.

Larry Hendel

Tax Cuts The cuts enacted by President Bush are set to expire at the end of this year. Republicans, led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, have called for extending the $700 billion in tax breaks for the rich. Not being discussed in all of this are two crucial issues. One of them is how much those tax cuts cost us. Basically, all the income taxes that everyone in America paid in January and February of this year only went to cover interest on the money borrowed for the Bush tax cuts over the last decade. Just interest on those tax cuts

The second issue not being discussed is that this top tax rate, the two that President Obama wants to have go back to the Clinton-era level, they cut in at a quarter-million dollars and about $400,000 of taxable income. In fact, we have a large number of people in this country now who are making multimillion-dollar annual incomes, and we’re not talking about a higher tax rate on them. We’re starting actually at a very low level.

And the very highest-paid workers in the history of the world, hedge fund managers, at least twenty-five of whom made a billion dollars last year, pay a current tax rate of zero. The news media keeps saying 15 percent. They pay the 15 percent, when they cash out, which could be decades from now. None of that is on the table.

The United States Supreme Court is once again deciding how much freedom to permit us. Old rules do not apply, it seems, in the age of the “war against terror.” Our government needs a whole new set of restrictions on speech and advocacy: see the decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, handed down 21 June.

This was nostalgia week for some of us.

When we left-wing intellectuals were being fired in the 1950s, I remember a snooty characterization by a senior administrator at the University of Michigan. Let us call him Dean Abbott (I prefer not to disclose his identity, but anyway I don’t recall his name). He assured a meeting of the faculty that they didn't need to waste their sympathy for those who might be attacked in the Red-hunt, for “these people are not important.”

I didn't stand up—a 27-year-old neophyte scientist—and argue that I was so important. I did right not to. The firings, and the Congressional panels and prison sentences that accompanied them, were important all right. But not mostly because they punished our dissent. The main thing was that they put a chill on dissent by everyone. Loss of our services to the American academy was much less important than the quenching of criticism there; and the loss of whatever criticism we might have made was enormously less important than the loss of criticism from our colleagues who remained in the academy, but muted.

Later, when I refused to testify before one of the Red-hunting committees of Congress, the press had it that I was defending my right to free speech. Over-simplification! Almost missing the point! Congressman Clardy’s Committee was intimidating my fellow citizens, who were more important because there were more of them. I thought the courts ought to outlaw the intimidation, so I chose to defy it. The only way the courts could have kept me out of prison, I figured, was to rule that the committees were overstepping their authority. The courts didn’t rule as I had hoped—not until a decade later.

When I was starting my prison term, I cockily put it this way to a reporter: “Six months of my life is not too much to give in the service of my country.” Another reporter asked me at the last minute, “If you're willing to serve six months in prison, why did you appeal your conviction?” He really didn't get it! I explained, as the federal marshals whisked me away, “If I had won at the Supreme Court, the hearings would have been outlawed. That would have been a bigger contribution.”

Not to my freedom of speech, which is no more important than any other individual’s: but to the freedom of general speech, exchange of views, by which democratic decision can occur; without which it can not.

And here we are again. Fifty-one years after the McCarran Act (1950), here comes the so-called “Patriot Act.” Fifty-one years after the Supreme Court ruled against Lloyd Barenblatt and me (1959), the Supreme Court rules against Ralph Fertig. We are supposed to shrug: after all, some of the thousands whose right to due process is annulled are probably guilty of something. If Ralph Fertig is prevented from helping some Kurds, even though he offers them no weapons but only teaching in non-violence, why worry: after all, some of them are supposedly guilty of something. But Dean Abbott, however unfair his scorn was, had it right in spite of himself. The targets of political repression may not be important. The repression is much more important than any individual target, because it is an attack on the life of society.

As my fellow defendant Pete Seeger puts it—When will they ever learn? Will it take the Supreme Court another ten years and another score of cases to re-learn what it finally came to see in the 1970s?

Mathematician and author Chandler Davis was fired from his teaching job at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s for refusing to testify about his political beliefs before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He cited the First Amendment in his defense, and went to jail for contempt of the committee when he lost his appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am outraged by the Center for Independent Living (CIL)'s latest move, backed (or instructed?) by the City of Berkeley, in an effort to obtain City funding to supplement its programs. After announcing to the City and Easy Does It Emergency Services (EDI) on August 13 that they were withdrawing their application for Measure E funding, then retracting that withdrawal a few hours later, CIL has now modified its proposal for the Measure E contract. This revised proposal has been accepted by the City and forwarded to the Commissions on Disability and Aging, who will be voting to recommend a vendor for the Measure E Contract on September 15.

I am asking you, as elected officials, to help answer the following questions: Why is CIL allowed to change their proposal repeatedly without any other bidders' involvement and public notification? What process was used by the City of Berkeley to receive CIL's improved proposal for Measure E funding, while the opportunity was not offered to competing vendors? Who quietly approved CIL's revised proposal to be forwarded to the Commissions on Disability and Aging, and the City Council, for evaluation and decision?

Is this the City of Berkeley's common practice for awarding its contracts--hand picking a vendor, railroading the approval process, and, when failed, forcing the selected vendor to stay in the bidding? CIL announced its application withdrawal after the community voiced their concerns regarding CIL's lack of experience and qualifications to provide emergency services. Since June, CIL has repeatedly stated that they wouldn't have applied for the Measure E contract if the City hadn't told them to do so, and that they never wanted the emergency components of the contract, which is the mandate of Measure E! CIL entered "collaboration" negotiations with the intent to "split" Measure E funding for its non-emergency programs, then decided to withdraw once they realized that there's no money to be split in Measure E.

It now appears that the City thinks they have a way to manipulate the funds after all... How else can anyone explain CIL's erratic behavior throughout the process, and the City's unyielding willingness to accommodate this behavior? Did the City orchestrate CIL's retraction of its application withdrawal, and its most recent proposal modification? Does the City really have the power to do whatever they want, whenever they want, in any manner they choose, thinking that the citizens would just let it happen without saying anything?!

Is the City doing this because it has given CIL (and the Ed Roberts Campus) so much money that they need to guarantee CIL's financial viability? That's great, but HOW--by killing another community agency who is perfecting its emergency services program, who is strongly supported by the community members, who called/wrote letters to their representatives, and showed up at several Commission and Council meetings to speak out? Or, by killing the emergency services program, forcing 2 agencies with different mission and scope to share the Measure E contract? By mixing non-emergency with emergency related activities, unnecessary resources would be spent by the City and the agencies, in order to justify using Measure E funds, etc., and this will only cause both agencies to fail. What would the City gain by destroying the program and putting the burden back on 911 and other emergency City personnel?

How many more City contracts will be awarded without merit but based on personal preference, political interest, or sheer ignorance, before the practice is stopped? Will the Council stop the outright corruption in the City's RFP process? I am asking you to stand up to the Mayor and the City Manager--by questioning the process and rationale for recommending an agency who is clearly not qualified to deliver Measure E mandated services, who never even wanted to deal with emergency services, and attempted to withdraw their application altogether. It would be a very unwise decision for the City Council to award CIL the Contract against the disability community's will.

Sincerely, Morning Shu, Berkeley property and business tax payer

*****See bullets below for a chronology of events.*****

Below is a chronology of the events leading to this letter which demonstrate CIL's ever changing position. After the "History of CIL's Inconsistent Position", I have copied the public events listed in my letter to the City's General Services Manger Sharon Thygesen on July 18 questioning the City's RFP process for your reference.

The executive director of Center for Independent Living (CIL) Yomi Wrong has publicly stated that CIL never would have applied for the Measure E contract, if the City had not invited them to do so (and by all indications, promised to award them the contract--before any proposals were even submitted)!

§ On June 8th, in a meeting between Easy Does It (EDI) and CIL, with community member Alana Theriault present, Yomi Wrong stated that CIL had only bid for the contract at the City's request, and the City is putting them in a position to be a "hammer...", and that they never wanted to administer emergency services--referring to the program as a "huge headache". However, they did want Measure E funding for wheelchair repair (and disaster registry).

§ On July 14, at the Commission on Disability Meeting, CIL's contractor represented the agency to announce its "alternate proposal"--stating that they do not want the attendant and transportation components of the Contract that were included in their initial proposal (essentially withdrawing that portion of their bid.) The process question was raised but not answered by the City personnel.

§ On July 15, EDI and CIL met to discuss collaboration possibilities at the City Manager Phil Kamlarz's request. Four City staff were present at that meeting: Phil Kamlarz, Jane Micallef, Drew King, and Jennifer Vasquez. Yomi Wrong emphasized that they never wanted the attendant and transportation components of the Contract, which are the core services mandated by Measure E. She characterized the service disparagingly, calling the program "a huge headache" and "an eight hundred pound gorilla" (an incorrect use of the phrase). She also repeated the hammer comment, this time, appearing to be willingly playing that role. The meeting ended with the City Manager telling the two agencies to "work it out, or I will work it out for you".

§ On July 20 (and one other meeting) where CIL met with John Benson from EDI to discuss possible "collaborations" on wheelchair repair, CIL claimed that the City is giving CIL 10% of the Measure E funding, that they have a "green light", and that "it's a done deal".

§ On July 29, EDI and CIL met with the above same 4 City staff to continue their discussion. They agreed that when they were to meet again on August 13, both agencies' should have a Board representative, in addition to the ED and relevant staff. When it was pointed out that the group was not allowed to use City property for this meeting due to "furlough" closure, Phil Kamlarz asserted that he had the authority to override the safety officer's order.

§ On August 13, EDI's 2 board members Don Brownell & Debby Graudenz (took time off from work), executive director Bonnie MacFadyen (calling in from her vacation), bookkeeper Nancy Ferreyra (volunteering her time), and transportation/repair coordinator John Benson (on his day off) showed up at the meeting only to hear Yomi Wrong announce that CIL was “walking away from the table,” and that pursuing a slice of the Berkeley Emergency Services contract was costing CIL too much money and hurting their reputation in the community..." But a few hours after EDI was approved by the City Contract Manager Drew King to announce the meeting's outcome, Mark Burns, deputy director of CIL, posted on the Berkeley Disabled Community list-serve that he "misspoke". Mark said he misspoke when he said that "CIL was withdrawing from the RFP process”, and that "Our (CIL's) original proposal remains on the table..."

§ On September 9, one of EDI's board members discovered that CIL's proposal posted on their website has been revised, and that the new proposal has been included in the Commission on Disability's September 15 meeting packet for their vote on who to recommend be awarded the Measure E funding. The new proposal was never announced publicly

The saga is not over--the Commission on Aging will meet on the same day, September 15, to do the same, and the Contract will be awarded by a vote of the City Council at one of their meetings in late September or in October--agenda to be proposed by the City Manager, likely with minimal notice to the City Council and the public. Will the City Council Members look into the City's contract selection practice and ask Phil Kamlarz the real reason why he is recommending CIL, after members of the disability community strongly recommend the Measure E Contract be awarded to EDI?

§ An agenda item to award the contract to CIL was placed by the City staff on the June 1st City Council Meeting agenda. On May 25, due to a deluge of phone calls and letters from community members to the Mayor and Council Members, the agenda item was changed to extend EDI’s contract for 4 months, while the City “receive community input”.

§ June 1 City Council Meeting–community members spoke at public comment period in support of EDI retaining the contract

§ June 9 Commission on Disability Meeting–large number of community members came out to support EDI retaining the contract, and express concerns about the recommended vendor’s ability to provide emergency services.

§ June 22 City Council Meeting–Council Members unanimously voted to extend EDI’s contract for 6 months, instead of proposed 4 months.

§ June 23 Commission on Aging Meeting

§ July 14 Commission on Disability Meeting–due to lack of quorum, the Commission was not able to vote for a recommendation. Community members were again there to support EDI, and had a good discussion with the Commissioners. CIL’s contract representative announced its “alternate proposal”, stating that they do not want the attendant and transportation components of the Contract that were included in their initial application. When the process question was raised, City personnel was not able to explain whether CIL’s alternate proposal qualifies other applicants to modify/resubmit their proposals.

§ July 15 (At the City Manager’s request in June) EDI and CIL representatives met to discuss collaboration possibilities, with City personnel in attendance–Phil Kamlarz, Jane Micallef, Drew King, and Jennifer Vasquez. The Exec Director of CIL emphasized that they never wanted the attendant and transportation components of the Contract, which are the core services mandated by Measure E. They want to “leverage” their wheelchair repair service program (being developed using a new grant from FEMA) to provide emergency wheelchair repair service–realizing that EDI is best suited to provide onsite and “after hour” emergency repair, as it often overlaps with emergency attendant & transportation calls. The discussion ended with the City Manger instructing the two vendors to work out a solution.

I'm currently reading a book called "The Holocaust," and in one of its first chapters the author describes Adolph Hitler's rise to power in Germany — wherein, in the early days of the National Socialist party, Hitler's Brown-Shirts were thugs and bullies whose main policy was to pick only on vulnerable little guys. Apparently, Hitler's SS-in-training only went on the attack when they knew that they were significantly more powerful than their opponents. Their main targets were always elderly people, women, minorities and isolated random individuals out on the street by themselves.

This same policy seems to be currently popular here in America now too.

A major policy of America's many right-wing hate-machines seems to be one of never attacking any of the rich and powerful corporations, bankers and weapons manufacturers who blatantly receive government welfare — billions of dollars at a time. No, the highly vocal right-wingers only attack those who cannot defend themselves — such as the vulnerable salt-of-the-earth Americans who are now forced to apply for a "welfare" helping hand after their jobs have been shipped overseas by wealthy corporatists who also enjoy receiving the government dole.

How come it is considered to be a wonderful thing for the rich to receive welfare — but if the middle-class or working classes apply, they are ridiculed and shunned? Why don't bankers and weapons manufacturers who live on the dole get that same scorn heaped upon them?

Recently a friend of mine was forced to apply for food stamps after having been laid off when the small company he worked for went belly-up due to lack of customers. My friend was a middle-class, middle-aged man steeped in the American tradition of self-sufficiency, and you could tell that applying for food stamps had been a decision that had humiliated him a lot.

"So why did you do it?" I asked.

"I'd been laid off my work, my unemployment benefits were tiny and my house payments were huge. And after my car broke down...." He shrugged. "It was either get food stamps — or no food."

"And what was it like?" I meant what it was like applying for food stamps. I already know what it was like to have to make choices between other things and food.

"Humiliating. Guilt-producing. Embarrassing. I kept looking around to make sure there was nobody at the food stamp place that I knew."

"Where did you apply?"

"At the county agency. I walked into this building, into a huge room, where I saw about ten people standing in line — so I got in line behind them. Wrong thing to do. 'Ex-CUSE me!' shouted a very angry lady behind me. 'This is NOT the end of the line.' The lady then gestured behind her and I saw approximately 150 more people standing in line behind her, snaking down and across the room and back up the other side — waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"Waiting to get a number. And after about a half-hour, I came to the head of the line and was given my number too. I had stood in line all that time just to be given a number? This was worse than the DMV. It was the waiting line from hell."

"Then what happened next?" I asked, curious.

"I people-watched for about another hour. And felt even more humiliated. And there was a police contingent in one corner — like they were expecting us to riot or something. And everyone else looked as humiliated and downtrodden as I did. They could have at least put up a sign at the door telling us what to expect."

"So. Did you get your food stamps?"

"I waited around in the waiting room — with about 300 other people — until my number was called. But, you know, once I finally got to talk to a real person, it was okay. The employees were really helpful and nice. They must have to deal with hundreds of people every day — yet they were still very nice. I was impressed."

"Then did you finally get your food stamps?"

"No. I was given an appointment to come back the next week."

This is what you have to go through to apply for welfare if you are a middle-class American citizen — in order to receive perhaps as little as $35 a month in food stamps. However, if you are a RICH American and want to receive BILLIONS (if not trillions) of dollars in welfare from the United States government, you only have to place a few calls to your lobbyist or Congressman and you will get immediate service — and probably valet parking as well.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the super-rich American corporatists who are now receiving government hand-outs by the truck-load were required to report to their county social services office and be forced to stand in line, be humiliated, feel guilty and take a number too?

Jean Quan has gotten endorsements from neighborhood activists, and others praying for change, ANY change for the better, in Oakland. She’s the default candidate people return to after considering the others in the race. Don Perata’s victory isn’t assured, as evidenced by Rebecca Kaplan’s entrance into the race (and triangulating for votes on issues like Nic-Nak Liquors). Quan is a determined precinct-walker (the lawn signs dotting front yards show that), and this outreach may be interpreted by some as respect and appreciation for the grass roots and local communities, which would persist if she were elected.

We have also heard defenses of Quan’s leadership on the school board, a rationalization of her stewardship as the school district careened into bankruptcy and state receivership, even as she was jumping ship to run for City Council.

The truth is, based upon some pivotal land-use decisions made while she was on the school board, and her trumpeting of “smart-growth” to rationalize pro-developer positions while on the City Council, she isn’t that different from Don Perata.

The Montgomery Ward Building Mess

As critics have noted, there are very short memories in politics. Bush & Co. had forgotten all about the Vietnam War quagmire, as they invaded Iraq. While certainly not on the scale of those mistakes, the Ward case history —involving key players on the School Board, City Council, and Mayor’s office —offers lessons still applicable today. Too often, botched, notorious contretemps get pushed under a rug. No one afterwards claims ownership, since many would just like to forget the mess. Not surprisingly, similar mistakes recur.

Therefore, Quan’s role in the Ward case is too important to ignore, too timely to dismiss.

The Sordid History:

One of the most important decisions Quan made on the school board was to promote the demolition of the Montgomery Ward Building on International Blvd., to build a new school in that location. The Montgomery Ward Building, which was owned by the City, was a “blighted” target to Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) which wanted it torn down, as did the district Councilperson, Ignacio De La Fuente. They ignored the adaptive reuse possibilities of the reinforced concrete building, and examples of other repurposed, income generating Ward Buildings in cities like Portland and Chicago.

Budget Busting

De la Fuente and OCO, with the support of then City Manager Robert Bobb and brand-new Mayor Jerry Brown, crafted the “solution” of selling the site to the School District for a new school for 600 students. This was a politically-inspired “solution” —school districts often prevail in battles of these sorts, whatever the overriding highest and best use for the sites in contention. (The Ambassador Hotel demolition in Los Angeles is a recent example, with the brand-new $578 million “Taj Mahal” school building replacement, in a school district with a $640 million budget shortfall and layoffs of 3000 teachers over 2 years.) Although it was outside her school district in the hills, Quan played a passionate leading role in seeing the Ward Building come down. She never equivocated, or sought common-ground.

The loss to the City, in terms of the bottom line, was substantial: one-time school impact fees of $850,000 and approximately $650,000 in property taxes to the City’s coffers every year if the building had been renovated as live-work lofts under a serious offer on the table. School districts don’t pay property taxes.

At the end of the day, the new school cost over 48 million, way above the original estimated $10-15 million price tag.

The battle to save the Ward Building was a long one, with the school district hiring expensive outside legal consul, the firm of Goldfarb & Lippman. Round One was lost when the City issued a “negative declaration” allowing the demolition, saying the National Register-eligible building (although with no official landmark status) could be demolished without any environmental review. Noted environmental attorney Susan Brandt-Hawley took the case to court, and the Court of Appeals ruled against the City. The decision had statewide importance —local jurisdictions, including Oakland, began to mandate EIRs for demolitions of A or B-rated (significant, landmark-eligible) buildings.

Global Warning: Not to Worry!

A real developer (unusual for Oakland, which often attracts “developers” with hands extended for subsidies) was interested in renovating the building with his own capital. The developer, San Francisco-based Emerald Fund, partnered with a big national developer, Forest City, which went on to do the Uptown project. Emerald Fund proposed sharing the site with the school they would build, in addition to 414 units of housing —167 live/work lofts and 247 apartments —in the 8 story, 900,00 square foot building, at the time, the largest remaining industrial building in Oakland. The Ward Building was a 5 minute walk from the Fruitvale BART station and transit village, something a smart-growth aficionado like Quan has since been promoting fervently on the City Council.

Quan Crosses Sierra Club

The simple logic of creating housing at the Ward Building, if lost on the politicos, made a lot of sense to the Sierra Club. In a Nov. 7, 1998 letter to Brandt-Hawley, the Sierra Club waded into the battle:”.... support(ing)... more inner city infill housing and development instead of suburban sprawl, especially projects near existing transit lines ...demolition of large existing buildings creates great waste disposal problems and expense...(and) new construction projects exert economic pressure to log precious public and private forests...”

Then Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope spoke out forcefully and attended pro-Ward Building events. De La Fuente threatened to retaliate, calling out the Sierra Club on economic injustice issues. (One wonders if Quan will revisit this history as she seeks the Sierra Club endorsement for Mayor.)

Ultimately, in 2001, after a second lawsuit, years of delays, rejection of alternate sites by the School district and thousands of dollars in legal fees, the Ward Building came down. Quan, taking the lead along with the other school board members including the Fruitvale District rep (and City employee) Noel Gallo and Kerry Hamill, Perata’s former chief of staff, had prevailed, even though, by this time, the Ward Building had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. But not before the developer reportedly made numerous large contributions to the political campaigns of local politicians —the usual pay-to-play that Oakland is notorious for. (An interesting footnote: Paul Cobb, who had been appointed by Mayor Brown as one of three new school board members in his attempt to makeover the School Board, defected from Brown on this issue and rallied against the demolition).

Environmental Disaster

The lead paint from the building in the dirty, fast, and cheap demolition was scattered to the winds and waters of the Bay, with no tarping or any special care taken to protect nearby residents or the environment. Paint was blasted off the facade with high-pressure water hoses, where it collected in gutters, sidewalks, and streets before scattering to the winds or running into the Bay. A City fire marshal was brave enough to write up a complaint and verify the lead toxicity, but the estimate for a lawsuit by the environmental group Baykeepers STARTED at $10,000. Needless to say, the City’s Environmental Affairs Office kept its distance from the toxic, political mess!

The upshot: the school was built on toxic soil, next to busy streets, where accidents including fatalities to pedestrians are a common occurrence, and in a polluted atmosphere —dangerous for children with asthma —next to the heavily-trucked 880 freeway.

Too late to do any good, the powerful Spanish Speaking Unity Council, which steered clear of the battle, lamented the lack of a diversity of incomes in the Fruitvale, which would benefit businesses. The Ward Lofts would have helped fill that need.

Before the housing crash, with numerous controversial condo projects in Temescal coming to the City Council, Quan was vociferous in promoting dense housing development on transit corridors, in one instance, citing word for word the language of SB 275, the state law which encourages dense transit development at the local level. Yet when she had the chance to promote a housing development in an existing landmark and structurally sound building, sharing the site with a school, funded with private capital, next to a BART station and alongside a major arterial, she made the easy, calculating, politically-expedient call.

Vaulting to the City Council as the school district slid into bankruptcy, she defied Colin Powell’s infamous Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it.

Another wrong-headed land-use choice involved her support for the expansion of redevelopment to all of North Oakland. Because we’re so blighted, right? This effort, which would have committed even more money to redevelopment at the expense of the General Fund (police, fire, libraries, etc.), was luckily doomed, coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. Before Councilperson Brunner pulled the plug on the effort, Quan was openly horse-trading to commit a stretch of MacArthur in her district, too, to redevelopment.

Lately, in election mode, Quan has modified her sanctimonious smart growth rhetoric, suggesting “her constituents didn’t want concrete canyons on their streets necessarily, either.” One is left wondering just what she does believe.

Rebecca Kaplan is another example of an Oakland politician who advances without any blowback from the awful state of the organization they’re vacating, In Kaplan’s case, AC Transit, which —despite infusions of taxpayer money for operating expenses from the VV bond measure —is nearly on life support, cutting service drastically, and clinging for life to the BRT dream and federal money.

As a nearly 40 year resident of Oakland, I am familiar with the perennial need to see our politicians through rose-colored glasses, hoping for the best. I even wrote copy for a “Sheila Jordan for City Council” campaign piece, describing her as a “reformer!” But any illusions or hope I might have had for Jean Quan were buried under the Ward rubble.

I read the obituary on Silber in the NY Times and its limited focus on Sing Out! It mentioned he was in the Communist Party and left it, but didn't discuss his editorship of the National Guardian and creation of the Guardian Clubs that later turned into Front Line clubs. The most interesting part would be to hear from people who were in Front Line to explain what they meant by a pre- Party Organization. There were similar attempts like the Committees of Correspondence to form a party that was not in the same mode as the CPUSA or the SWP, October League, RU, et al--a non-party party?

It would be helpful to recount some of that history, to explain what people were doing in the 80s and 90s.

I knew of the National Guardian (NY City) before going to the big hippy meeting in Vermont to hear guru Baba Ram Dass in the 70s. A hundred from the West Coast traveled on an airplane rented by a wealthy hipster/rock promoter to meet the guru. Silber showed up one day, as I remember, in spanking white shorts, white sneakers, shirt and hat ready to play TENNIS. I loved him at first sight. A few others gathered around him at lunch listening to him chat about Marxist politics and theory. Then we went to a few sessions with Ram Dass with bells and chants. It was a unique event.

Later I was invited to go on a Guardian tour to China with 25 others, organized by Harold Leventhal, yet another old CPer who was agent for Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Arlo Guthrie (the family) for many years. He later put together a concert with Pete and Arlo, attracting the 80 year olds and the 8 year olds. Leventhal was good, and better than Bill ‘Big Bucks’ Graham.

So where did Front Line go?

I came a cropper with them in a solidarity organization, Friends of Nicaragua, but that’s an old tale. Silber organized Front Line, it was active for a while, but what was the line? Anyone able and want to fill in – please do. (If the Editor will so allow).

This would be what Irwin Silber was good at, explaining how opposition to capitalism functions.

I am a Co-Secretary on the Board of Directors for Easy Does It Emergency Services. On Friday, August 13th , I took a half-day off work to be one of five representatives from Easy Does It to attend a pre¬scheduled two-hour negotiation/collaboration meeting with CIL representatives and Drew King from the City of Berkeley. We were surprised when right at the beginning of the meeting Yomi Wrong, the Executive Director at CIL, announced to the room that CIL was "walking away from the table," and that pursuing a slice of the Berkeley Emergency Services contract was costing CIL too much money and hurting their reputation in the community, that their only reason for pursuing part of the contract was in the interests of the community and not the funds, and that they had their funding for their repair shop and that the shop would go ahead, regardless. We were out of the meeting in 40 minutes and there was no discussion about a negotiation because it appeared that CIL was no longer interested in Measure E funds. In previous meetings, CIL continually stated that they wanted no part of the Emergency Attendant or Emergency Transportation elements of the program.

The challenge of maintaining our funding was seemingly over, but the relief was sadly short-lived. EDI felt that we could once again focus entirely on our development as an agel:lcy with projects like enhancing our database and increasing our outreach to provide our excellent services to a broader community, but a few hours after we were approved by Drew King to announce the meeting's outcome, Mark Bums from CIL posted on the Berkeley Disabled Community list-serve that he misspoke. Mark said he misspoke when he said "that ClL was withdrawing from the RFP process," and went on to explain that, "We [CIL] have not done that. Our original proposal remains on the table and we'll respect whatever the end result may be."

EDI had previously presented a lengthy list of in-kind collaborative proposals that did not involve any exchange of money, because sacrificing any part of our funding would result in the deterioration of EDI as an agency. We have offered for example a Community Training for Wheelchair Awareness by EDI at CIL; Training CIL staff to do assistive equipment repair; Free (to CIL) transportation and dispatch for community members needing to go to the new CIL shop; Access to loaner chairs (3); Access to EDI assistive equipment parts/inventory (listed in EDI proposal); and New equipment training (as new equipment becomes available). We simply do not want to sacrifice the integrity of the services we already provide by segregating or dissolving services so we offered these collaborative ideas.

This entire controversy over the Measure Econtract comes at a time when EDI is at its strongest because of the long term efforts by the Board of Directors to make the agency a more professional organization. We recently achieved a milestone with the hiring of our Executive Director, .Bonnie MacFadyen, who has efficiently reorganized the administrative office and given our wonderful field staff a substantial and eamed wage increase. We are continuing to meet with our (largely volunteer) consultants in order to further train our Board to be the best it can be. We plan to conduct outreach and fundraising events and submit grant applications, but as long as we are embedded in the struggle to maintain Measure Efunds, we cannot move forward.

In the weeks ahead, we will be attending meetings for the Commission on Disability and the Commission on Aging to plead our case and offer even more education on the necessity of our program in the community. We also have a meeting scheduled with the City Manager and a possible vote by the City Council may be held this month.

If any of you feel, as I do, that EDI should continue to serve the Berkeley community, please attend the public meetings (times listed below) and write your City Councilpersons. Additionally, if you cannot attend the Commission on Disability meeting email Secretary Paul Church with your comments at PChurch@ci.berkeley.ca.us. If anyone has further questions or input to what I've written here, please write me and I will do my best to answer.

On September 14, 2001, the U.S. Congress voted almost unanimously to hand President George W. Bush its constitutional power to declare war. Not a single senator and only one representative opposed a resolution that mentioned no enemy country and left it up to the president to fight anyone he decided had anything to do with the terror attacks of the 11th. He decided on Afghans.

The lone nay-sayer was Barbara Lee, the representative of California’s 9thCongressional District (including Berkeley and Oakland). She reminded colleagues on 9/14 that in 1964 Congress had allowed President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures” to repel any attack on U.S. forces. (The so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution followed what later proved to be an imaginary attack by North Vietnamese boats on U.S. naval ships.) “In so doing,” she said, “this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.”

In 1964 Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, backed only by Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska in opposing a blank check for presidential warmaking, said that “history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution….” Barbara Lee commented, “Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today.”

Convinced that military action would not prevent further terrorism, she cautioned that it could spiral out of control to rush to judgment and respond to an unconventional attack in a conventional way. “If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women, children, and other noncombatants will be caught in the crossfire.” In a further display of prescience, Representative Lee warned that it would repeat past mistakes “to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”

When she walked off the House floor that day, colleagues urged her to change her vote. Hostile mail arrived and threats against her life made security measures necessary.

A talk on war and peace

The action begun by Bush on Oct. 7, 2001, in Afghanistan and now expanded to Pakistan — though none of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers was either Afghan or Pakistani — bids to become the longest war in American history. (On October 18 it will exceed the length of the overt U.S. war in Indochina, counting from Johnson’s first bombing of Vietnam to Nixon’s last bombing of Cambodia.)

Barbara Lee is no longer alone among members of Congress in opposition to the war. Last March a concurrent resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio to withdraw forces from Afghanistan drew 65 House votes (including five Republicans). Representative Lee’s stand has become a cause for honor more than hostility. She is in demand as a speaker and has acceded to the request of several local peace groups that she expound her views.

So at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 26, at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar Street at Bonita Avenue in Berkeley, Barbara Lee will reflect on war and peace, the war power, and the congressional actions she has taken accordingly. Questions and answers will follow her main talk. Admission will be free. The hall is the meeting place of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (BFUU).

In recognition of her work for peace, she will get an award from the East Bay branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The group is a joint sponsor of the event, along with BFUU, the Ecumenical Peace Institute, Grandmothers Against the War, Gray Panthers, and the War and Law League (which will hold its biennial meeting at the hall following the question period).

3 controversial women

As we review Congresswoman Lee’s record, it is a good time to celebrate the careers of two forerunners, women who figured prominently in war-and-peace controversies of the past:

September 6 will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth in Illinois of Jane Addams, who lectured on peace, opposed U.S. entry into World War I, and was consequently attacked by the press. She helped found and then headed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, fed civilians in enemy nations, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Last June 11 was the 130th anniversary of the birth of Rep. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan and Germany in 1941. She had voted against war on Germany in 1917 also, along with 50 representatives and six senators. She was the first woman in Congress, even before women won the right to vote in 1920.

Both women were pacifists. Barbara Lee, daughter of a veteran of two wars, says she is not a pacifist. But she has been a vocal opponent of the current Iraq war and was one of 133 representatives voting against the resolution of 2002 letting Bush Junior decide whether to start the war — which he had already decided. Twenty-three senators also opposed the measure.

Moreover, the East Bay representative has sponsored measures to deny funds for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, to disavow the doctrine of preemptive war, and to bar any presidential pact with Iraq or other nation independent of Congress.

As for Afghanistan: Last year she introduced a bill to bar funding for additional troops. This year she voted for withdrawal of forces and against supplemental appropriations. Most recently, on July 30, Congresswoman Lee introduced H.R. 6045, legislation to begin to end the war by limiting funds for armed forces’ operations in Afghanistan to “the safe and orderly withdrawal” of all troops and military contractors that are there.

And she does not believe in giving a president a blank check to wage war.

Paul W. Lovinger is secretary of the War and Law League (warandlaw.org), an author, and a journalist.

Columns

Each day it’s becoming more apparent that Democrats are headed for a whipping on November 2nd unless they get their act together. While it’s Barack Obama’s job to rally voters, a lot of Dems aren’t sure he can do it. We feel that somewhere over the course of the last 20 months, Obama lost his mojo and, as a result, doesn’t remember what he stands for or what the Democratic Party stands for. If Dems are going to pull victory out of the fire, we’re going to have to see passion from Obama; he’s going to have to take off his gloves and fight.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. identified Obama’s central problem: “The president's efforts to lay down a consistent rationale, argument and philosophy have been sporadic. He has created a vacuum…” The Candidate who many of us believed was a master communicator has failed, as President, to articulate his vision for the US.

As Drew Westen and George Lakoff observe, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have lost control of the national narrative. Instead of being told that government can be a vital force for good, voters are inundated with conservative messages that government is the problem. Instead of being reminded that too much economic inequality is a bad thing, that it undermines our economy and democracy and violates our moral principles, voters are told taxation is unfair and beguiled by the failed promise of trickle-down economics. Instead of being informed that the success of the United States has been based upon a strong public enterprise and a humane form of capitalism, voters are seduced by the image of an open market and privatization of public services.

It’s not too late for President Obama to seize control of the national narrative, but many of us are beginning to doubt whether he has the stomach for it.

Academic and political consultant Drew Westen argued that Obama’s job is apparent: “What Democrats have needed to offer the American people is a clear narrative about what and who led our country to the mess in which we find ourselves today and a clear vision of what and who will lead us out.”

Academic and political consultant George Lakoff agreed with Westen, adding it’s vital to recognize the role of values: “Candidate Obama made the case that American is, and has always been, fundamentally about Americans caring about each other and acting responsibly on that care… Winning this election will require the right policies and actions, but it will also require moral leadership with honest, morally-based messaging.”

There are several competing theories about why Barack Obama has lost control of the national narrative. One blames his staff and suggests that Obama got good advice during the campaign but bad advice from the presidential staff. For the past twenty months, the economy has been the central issue and the President lost control of that narrative because he listened to the wrong guys.

Another theory argues that once he became President, Obama received poor communication advice. The White House lost control of the national narrative because they wandered into wonk land and forgot the importance of framing their agenda in terms of vision and values.

The most common theory is that the problem lies within Barack Obama. One explanation is that Obama is by nature a conciliatory person and has had a hard time accepting that he’s in a situation where his adversaries have no interest in finding common ground. Another is that Barack believes that Americans elected him to set a new moral tone in Washington and try to bring the two Parties together. Still another explanation is that Obama is an intellectual and doesn’t have the taste for street fighting that’s characteristic of successful American politicians; he’s soft.

There’s a simpler explanation: Barack is an idealist. He believes in what Robert Reich identified as a core American myth: the benevolent community, the story of “neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good”

But sometimes idealism isn’t enough. Reich identified a flip side of the tale of the benevolent community: the story of the mob at the gates; the forces of darkness that threaten American democracy. One of the differences between an idealist and a realist is recognition that sometimes we have to fight to keep the mob from storming the gates. That’s what happened after Pearl Harbor.

That’s what needs to happen in the Fall of 2010. Barack has to become a realist.

Because of blind political ambition and staggering stupidity, Republicans have unleashed the forces of darkness and now the Tea Party mob is hammering at the gates of America.

It’s good that Barack Obama is an idealist. It’s good that he wants to be a conciliator, believes that there should be a new moral tone in Washington. But now is the time for realism. Now is the time for the President to stand at America’s gates and defend us from an angry, hate-filled, nihilistic mob. Now is the time for Obama the fighter.

“I just love Sleeping Beauty! The music, the sets, the costumes. It's so romantic!” declares Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw… “You only like it because she sleeps for a hundred years and doesn't age” responds chum Stanford Blatch.

Years ago, “Intimacy, love and friendship after 50” was the subject of one of the courses offered by a Bay Area community college with the goal of “mainstreaming” seniors. (Did seniors want to be in the mainstream? Do they now?) “Contemporary moral issues” and “Freud and the neo-Freudians” were also on the menu.

In their fifties, some people may experience a reawakening of sexual interest because they no longer need to prevent pregnancy, and the pressures of child rearing are past. Sexual problems are not necessarily a natural, irreversible part of aging. It is important to distinguish among the effects of the aging process itself, hormonal changes as women go through menopause, and illness, disability and relationship difficulties.

What about impotence and older men? By their mid-to-late fifties, one of four is impotent. By their mid-to-late sixties more then half are impotent, and by their mid-seventies most are impotent. In March 1999, Viagra exploded onto the market, and in 2006, one of every four men was taking it. Viagra has a high effective rate. It works in 90% of sexual dysfunctional cases that have biological causes and has a 60-70% effectiveness rate overall.

Avis Yarbrough in Health & Wellness reported on “STDs and AIDS in Senior Citizens”(www.healthandwellnessmagazine.net). There is a widely held belief that as you get older, your sex drive diminishes. But the invention of Viagra has made this not the case. She provided these data: Venereal diseases are spreading more than ever among senior citizens. People age 50 and older make up more than 10 percent of total AIDS cases in this country, and HIV cases are increasing among people in their 60’s and 70’s according to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has been reported that during the last decade, the number of HIV cases has risen 500 percent among senior citizens, and AIDS cases among over-50 people have risen from 16,00 in 1975 to 90,00 in 2003. Currently, nearly 27 percent of people living with AIDS in America are 50 and older.

Leonard Hayflick, in his popular “How and why we age,” describes changes in sexual activity. Relative frequency of sexual activity does not change with age-- the men who are most sexually active in their seventies were also highly active sexually in their twenties. A slightly higher level of testosterone is present in men who are more sexually active. Sexual activity decreases with age despite maintenance of normal levels of sex hormones. Enlargement of the prostate gland is common in men over age 60; it is unrelated to the amount of sexual activity, number of sexual partners, or length or stability or marriage.

“If there is one style of consciousness that will surely have to change radically in the elder culture, it is that of the alpha male,” writes Berkeley author Theodore Roszak in his new book, “The making of an elder culture.” In speaking of the end of sex (Chapter 9, ‘Love, loyalty, and the end of sex,’ ) he is using end in the sense of a goal, rather than a finish.

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Columnist Carrie Bradshaw observes: “When you're young, your whole life is about the pursuit of fun. Then, you grow up and learn to be cautious. You could break a bone or a heart. You look before you leap and sometimes you don't leap at all because there's not always someone there to catch you. And in life, there's no safety net. When did it stop being fun and start being scary?”

Why are senior citizens contracting STD’s or HIV? They did not come of age when sex education was being taught in public schools, and they are likely to be uninformed about Aids and HIV and how to protect themselves. Due to divorce or a partner dying, they now find themselves dating again and are unfamiliar or not used to protecting themselves. A lot of older men date more then one woman at a time. Some older women, no longer able to get pregnant, see no need to use any type of birth control, which includes condoms.

Sexual abuse is one of the several types or forms of elder abuse. It includes molestation, rape, sex acts and sexual touching as well as such things as showing an elderly person pornographic material, forcing him/her to watch sex acts, or forcing the elder to undress. Watch for torn or bloody clothing, unexplained venereal disease or genital infections, or genital or anal pain, itching, bruising, bleeding. Be aware that some seniors will be too embarrassed to report this, they may have received threats, or if they suffer from some form of dementia, they might not even recall that the sexual abuse took place. Sexual abuse of an elder often constitutes domestic violence. The elder abuse site at HelpGuide.org is worth checking out.

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Good news: “Senior entertainment back in the black.” Other media comments about 2008’s “Cloud 9” (“Wolke Neuin”) include “A story of new love in old age,” “German romantic drama,” “seniors sex dramedy”, and “critical raves and a clever marketing campaign aimed at geezers turned Andreas Dresen’s ’Cloud 9’ into a certified sleeper.” (Berkeley Public Library dvd; English subtitles. Note: This is not the 2006 Burt Reynolds “Cloud 9” motion picture. Far from it.)

Here's what the future might hold if you're lucky: being naked and old and making ecstatic love in a sun-drenched room. Karl (Horst Westphal), 76, is unattached, 60ish. Grandmother Inge (award-winning Ursula Werner) is married to Werner (Horst Rehberg), and they care for each other. Inge's affair with Karl and the inevitable confrontation. Several scenes take place in a senior center-like environment. Ursula is shown singing with what Werner refers to as “your women’s chorus.” The lyrics are metaphoric for her love life. The ending might be predictable, but it shows that you're never too old to enjoy the bliss of love — or suffer its pains.

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Attention, candidates… Running for election in the November election? You are invited to email to Senior Power (pen136@dslextreme.com) a statement of your “platform” in regard to senior citizens, e.g. housing, health, transportation. If you are running for re-election, please describe the highlights of your record on issues important to seniors. Keep in mind that Early Voting begins on Monday, October 4, 2010.

Chris Newfield, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, has recently published an article called “Bain’s Blow to Berkeley”. It’s a gloomy analysis of how cost saving measures being implemented at UC Berkeley are likely not only to harm the University’s teaching mission, but in fact to increase rather than diminish costs. It’s a moving work.

Some of you won’t have heard of Chris Newfield (I hadn’t) and some will (he’s a famous author and well known within the UC system). I am thinking that perhaps more people should know of him. After all, few people can write 27 paragraphs – 2500 words – of financial facts and figures alongside careful application of management theory and receive responses like this comment:

“Anonymous said... Professor Newfield, as a staff member who has been through a take no prisoners downsizing and admin unit merge, I read your report with tears forming in my eyes. I think it is very `right on’. I hope your report is sent to all Chancellors, EVCs, VCAs, and Senate Chairs.” (emphasis added.)

The new Newfield article is about a rather ironic development at UC Berkeley. Chancellor Birgeneau, faced with cuts in money provided by the state, began to seek ways to save money and prepare for massive budget reductions. He did what any high level executive might do: he paid a consulting firm, Bain and Co., three million dollars to look the place over and make some cost saving suggestions. Oddly enough, “Avoid paying someone three million dollars to tell you how to save money,” was not among the suggestions in Bain’s report. Newfield goes to town on many of the suggestions that are in the report.

I’ll give you a taste of Newfield’s “read it and weep” analysis of how Bain and Birgeneau haven’t quite nailed this cost saving plan down all that well but, before I do, how about a brief introduction to Newfield?

“The presidential election has generated new proposals for reinvestment in America's basic social infrastructure: roads and bridges, health care, job training and employment, renewable energy, and education. Barack Obama's campaign has called for a ‘National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank,’ which has growing Congressional support, and last January mayors and governors from both major parties formed a coalition to start the rebuilding process.”

(The current bill to implement such a bank (H.R. 2521) is pending in the Senate. Government infrastructure spending has also increased by other means.)

Newfield has his optimistic side. He continues:

“The current financial crisis will undoubtedly cause short-term public budget cuts as government officials figure out how to pay a staggering bailout bill. The current financial crisis will undoubtedly cause short-term public budget cuts as government officials figure out how to pay a staggering bailout bill. But in the long run, it will reduce many leaders' confidence in market forces and encourage greater interest in public investments in the economy. People will be increasingly reluctant to let financial markets determine their standard of living.” (emphasis added.)

I’m not sure I yet see a popular push for increased government spending to insure standards of living against the vagrancies of financial markets but perhaps that’s just around the bend. Nevertheless, it brings us to what I most wanted to share:

“Yet even though higher education is an important source of economic and social progress, public investment is not keeping up with increased enrollments or the costs of high-quality teaching and research — and the future doesn't look any brighter. [….]

“Why is public education the poor pupil of public investment? Part of the explanation is political: A quarter-century of culture wars has undermined the egalitarian values and tax-based public infrastructure that made America a mass middle-class society after World War II. Since 1980, stratification by income has steadily worsened, and higher education has been caught in an ideological crossfire between traditional supporters and conservative elites who want to set that broad middle-class majority back. [….]” (emphasis added.)

There’s my friend. See what he did there? The problem isn’t, in his view, that public universities are the inevitable, necessary victims of government budget reality. Rather, he believes that they are under budgetary attack precisely because they help to create a middle class rather than a beaten down proletariat. And they have been for a long time. And he can prove it.

It’s not a statement he makes lightly. Around the time he published the above statements about class warfare, he’d published “The Unmaking of the University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class”, a nearly 500 page book , very well reviewed, exploring the topic.

I can not concisely do full justice to Newfield’s full analysis of the Bain cost saving report. He argues in some detail, drawing upon his extensive research into how University’s work, that Bain is proposing to save costs by creating stronger centralized management, reducing the freedom of individual departments to address their specific needs directly, and imposing new and greater administrative costs. These are the kinds of words that bring tears to the eyes of an anonymous staffer on the inside:

“The image [depicted by Bain] is the bureaucratic version of the alien ship in Independence Day, a looming, inverted pyramid in which top dwarfs bottom and threatens to swallow it whole. Everything flows top-down, and the administrative content takes the form of goals-metrics-evaluation which are communicated to units (metrics –assessment of performance), on down to supervisors (accountability functions) and then finally to individuals (performance metrics tied to unit goals.) Relationships are reduced to the abstract modalities of compliance embodied in assessment procedures. Management is not support for the university’s necessarily diverse creative functions but is a state of permanent evaluation. There is no respect here for the autonomy of the units – departmental staff, student services, and technical staff for laboratories – that are close to the `customer’ (cf. `autonomous culture’ as a source of inefficiency in procurement, slide 35). The tone is of control through communication, through finance, through even more of the endless audit and evaluations to which UC employees are already subject. The implicit diagnosis is that Berkeley’s employees are inefficient because they are insufficiently assessed, measured, and financially incentivized.”

Kino's Lost Keaton release is perhaps misnamed. "Overlooked," "dismissed," or "neglected" might have been more accurate, for these films were never lost, but merely disregarded.

This two-disc set contains the 16 two-reelers that Keaton cranked out for the poverty-row Educational Pictures studio in the mid-1930s. Nothing here holds a candle to the comedian's silent-era creative peak during the 1920s, when he turned out 19 masterful two-reelers and a dozen classic feature comedies. But the Educational films, whether due to low expectations or genuine merit, are surprisingly good and never without charm.

Viewers new to Keaton should steer clear for the time being and instead begin their course of study with those earlier gems — inventive two-reelers such as One Week and Cops, and timeless features such as The General, The Navigator, Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality and Steamboat Bill Jr. But for the Keaton Konnoiseur, there is much pleasure to be found in this collection, and much solace to be taken in the fact that, even at his nadir, the great comedian was far from washed up.

Keaton had undergone a stunning reversal of fortune, falling from grace as one of the triumvirate of great silent clowns and landing, in 1934, at Educational, a low-budget outfit that too was past its prime. Buster had always been a hard worker, but he had never known failure, thus this mid-career turn of events was all the more devastating. He had been a star almost since birth, becoming, at the age of 2, a central player in his family's vaudeville act. He spent his youth on the road and on the stage until he set out on his own at the age of 21. After an apprenticeship with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, serving as co-star and co-director for the comedian whose popularity placed him second only to Chaplin, Keaton soon became the star of his own films and embarked on his unbroken string of sterling independent films.

After two years of two-reelers, Keaton graduated to features and again met with success. But after 10 strong showings, produced biannually, things began to go awry. His producer and brother-in-law, Joseph Schenk, sold Keaton's contract to MGM, and the comedian, who was many things but never a businessman, accepted the deal, against the advice of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, his more shrewd competitor/colleagues.

Following on the heels of Keaton's bitter divorce from Natalie Talmadge, the MGM deal marked the beginning of a steep professional decline for the great clown. MGM treated him like a mere actor, granting him no latitude in selecting, writing or directing his films; he was a hired hand, nothing more. Though the studio's strong marketing and distribution departments ensured larger audiences and better ticket sales for his films, Keaton was demoralized, and his creative ennui, combined with his increasing alcoholism, quickly sent him in a downward spiral that sent him tumbling out the studio's side door.

And so he landed at Educational, where he would remain for two years. They weren't the worst films he would make; that honor would be reserved for the two-reelers he would make for Columbia a few years later, a series with even lower budgets and tighter time constraints than Columbia, and which, with the exception of a few flashes here and there, demonstrate little of the great comedian's talent.

Whereas Keaton had spent four to six weeks on his independent two-reelers in the early '20s, Educational demanded that he produce a film in just three to five days. Limited time and resources dictated a rather formulaic approach, meaning that Keaton was forced to rely more heavily on some of his stock gestures: clasped hands when lovestruck; pratfalls more perfunctory than inventive; a grimace as a hand consoles a damaged nose when a door closes abruptly in his face. But over time it becomes clear that these repetitions are not intended as gag-topping laugh-getters, but rather as signature gestures, familiar refrains that the audience can expect and anticipate. Like Bugs Bunny's "What's up, Doc?" they're not necessarily funny in and of themselves; they're more like the catchy choruses in a pop song.

The series starts strong with The Gold Ghost, in which Buster finds himself in a distinctly Busteresque situation: when his car breaks down in an abandoned Western town, granting the comedian the chance to stage a series of pratfalls — a solitary man in an empty town. He plays sheriff, adopts a manly swagger, and demonstrates his incompetence every step of the way. The sound era's incessant demand for dialogue often slowed the pace and impact of Keaton's comedy at MGM, but here, with a bit more leeway, he manages to stage strong sight gags between bouts of dialogue: a poker game on dusty table at a forgotten saloon; doing the laundry at the old trough — a gag that unfortunately doesn't pay off as well as it promises; a hallucinatory gun battle in which Keaton plays the romantic hero.

Allez Oop demonstrates Buster's talent for small gags in which his character must improvise a solution to an immediate problem. At the circus, Buster's girl, her attention riveted by a trapeze act, fails to notice that she is sitting on his hand. To retrieve his hand, he holds his hat under her chin and slowly lifts it, ensuring that she stand to see over what appears to be the head of the spectator in front of her. It's a brief moment, a throwaway gag, and yet it's the kind of small comedic moment that wins an audience's affection.

One-Run Elmer gave Keaton the chance to stage a series of gags around his beloved game of baseball, using a number of gags he had previously performed at celebrity charity games. And Grand Slam Opera, perhaps the best-known of the series, in which Buster tries to make it big on a talent show at a New York radio station by juggling and doing other acts that couldn't possibly be appreciated by a radio audience, gags that simply, gave Keaton the opportunity to revive a few gags from the old family vaudeville routine. It also features one of Keaton's classic moments from his later career, in which he attempts to become Fred Astaire by clumsily dancing on the furniture of his hotel room until he destroys the bed.

Lost Keaton: 1934-1937. $34.95. www.kino.com.

Coinciding with the release of Lost Keaton are two discs of films by his sisters-in-law, Norma and Constance Talmadge.

Norma Talmadge was one of the biggest stars of her day, a dramatic actress whose popularity rivaled that of Mary Pickford, but whose legacy was hampered by the fact that so few of her films survive. In the 1920s she starred in a string of weepy tragedies, romances and melodramas, her signature role being the persecuted heroine or star-crossed lover. Kino has released a double-feature that includes one of these, Within the Law (1923), in which Talmadge is unjustly accused of theft and sent to prison, as well as a rare comedy, Kiki (1926), which the aspiring Parisian chorus girl attempts to woo Ronald Colman, the show's manager.

Though younger sister Constance appeared in D.W. Griffith's towering epic Intolerance, for the most part she dedicated her career to lighter fare, starring in a number of bright and charming comedies. Her Night of Romance (1924) sees her as an heiress who must travel incognito so as to avoid fortune-hunting playboys, but falls for a deceptively well-off nobleman — again, in the form of Ronald Colman. And Colman again takes the male lead in Her Sister From Paris, in which the bored husband falls for his flashy European sister-in-law, an opportunity for Talmadge to play dual roles to great effect.

The Norma Talmadge Collection. Featuring original scores by the Biograph Players and Makia Matsumura. $29.95. www.kino.com.

The Contance Talmadge Collection. Featuring original scores by the Judith Rosenberg and Bruce Loeb. $29.95. www.kino.com.

I found a little jewel last Friday night. There is a small 67-seat theatre at 999 E. 14thSt. in San Leandro called the California Conservatory Theatre of San Leandro. They touted themselves to be a professional theatre, but I doubted it from the looks of their website and the fact that you can’t buy a ticket online. But they lived up to their promise. If I had paid double the ticket price for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee musical, I would have gone home happy.

Marilyn Langbehn divined the rhythm and nature of the play in her direction. Others might have gone for the big overdone characters that inhabit musical theatre, but she understood the gentleness of the play and went with the changing rhythms as written by Rachel Sheinkin and William Finn. Each character is individuated, and the acting is by-and-large realistic which is a welcome phenomenon in a musical. The voices are all first-class, with a variety of ranges, and that uniformity of great voices is doubly welcome.

Jade Shojaee gives us chills as a dour, business-like, overachieving Catholic school girl in the classic uniform. Michael Cabanlit, with his great vocal belt, plays the trustworthy, loyal, friendly, helpful, runty, stocky kid who shows up in his Scout uniform. Alona Bach makes us believe she is that lisping, pigtailed, little politically militant middle-schooler with two dads and a hyphenated last name. Handsome Erik Rhea inhabits the character of the home-schooled, stoned-on-life kid who makes his own clothes and goes into a trance to spell. ToriLynn McBride breaks our hearts as the abandoned little blonde powder puff. The larger than life character that steals the show is played by Nickolas Quintell, as the obnoxious, supercilious lummox of a friendless loner with horn-rimmed glasses—who does an unwitting hootchy-kootchy while spelling the words out with his “magic foot.”

Equity actor Stephen Pawley plays the displaced vice-principal as Elmer Fudd on the verge of a nervous breakdown with hilarious timing. Anna Cook is subtly effective as the former bee champ moderator whose hyperrealism portrays a sedate, polite, repressed realtor who is a walking definition of a life unfulfilled. Reggie D. White convinces us as the street-wise parolee doing community service work by being the bouncer—but turns to comforting the losers and wins our hearts in his arc. And White and Rhea do a superb caricature of the two overbearing, gay dads.

Each solo delineates their characters, and the believable acting of the message of each song never fails to move us while making us laugh. Memorable moments include: Michael Cabanlit’s hysterical complaint in song about the intrusiveness of his untimely and persistent adolescent erections; “I Speak Six Languages” by Shojaee reveals the pain of teenage genius pushed too far; the touching, tearful “I Love You” in trio by Cook, White, and ToriLynn McBride that cuts to the heart of parents who try to find their own path of bliss on their children’s time; but the piece de resistance is an unlikely pas de deux between McBride’s powder puff and Quintell’s lummox performed with near-professional grace and skill. All the dance pieces are creative and executed with precision and élan.

Malcolm Carruthers’ lighting is flat and frontal and replicates the lighting of every gymnasium you’ve ever been in, but that sameness sets up the light show for the dancing sprees they throw themselves into during their episodes of subconscious freak-outs brought on by teen anxiety and added to by the pressure of competition.

Ric Koller’s simple set of bleachers, gym floor with basketball court markings, folding table and enormous winner’s cup easily transports us to our teenage memories. The stage is larger than expected, the sight lines are unimpaired from any of the five rows of raked seating, and the acoustics are excellent.

The costumes by Jan Koprowksi instantly reveal character and her naturalistic choices help us enter this little world.

Some of the non-belting sopranos’ moments vie with the accompaniment, and I found it curious that the centerpiece microphone is a prop only and not used for amplification. That hollow boom and clumsy knocking and feedback of the mike in the gym with the unsure voices asking for the word to be used in a sentence resonates in my memory as the emblematic sound of all spelling bees.

Michael Moran’s musical direction is seamless, and, to his credit, his onstage piano accompaniment is a practically invisible.

I must admit that I was a tad reluctant to venture there because I confused upper E. 14th St. in San Leandro with the somewhat scary E. 14th St. of my Oakland. But the theatre is next to City Hall and the Police Station in a tree-lined, ivy-trellised complex with a free parking lot next door. It’s in the business district abutting an upper-middle class neighborhood, and an easy ten-minute and seemingly safe walk to BART. The bus stops in front of the theatre that the City of San Leandro has the good sense and generosity to lease to the company for a nominal fee. I found it easily accessible from 580 via the Estudillo/Dutton exit.

Note that this theatre is called CCT not CCCT or CCMT—a most confusing alphabet soup of East Bay theatre company abbreviations.

The seating is comfortable, the front-of-house people are friendly, and you won’t be disappointed. But hurry, because it only runs 14 performances and ends the last Sunday of September. It’s a surprising place for such professionalism, but they convinced me—and I’m a tough sell.

California Conservatory Theatre of San Leandro, 999 East 14th Street, San Leandro

Friday & Saturday at 8pm; Saturday & Sunday at 2pm through September 26.

The last week to catch Inferno Theatre's unusual production of Galileo's Daughters, written, designed and directed by Giulio Perrone at the Berkeley City Club (review in last week's Planet). Thursday-Saturday, 8 p. m.; Sunday at 5. $12-$25, sliding scale. 698-4030; infernotheatre.org

TheatreFirst's Anton In Show Business, play about an ensemble of seven actresses rehearsing--and coming apart over--a production of Three Sisters, directed by the company's artistic director Michael Storm, is onstage at the Marion Greene Theater, 531-19th St., off Telegraph (and a block from 19th Street BART) on the north side of the old Fox Theater, uptown Oakland. Thursdays-Sundays through September 26. $15-$30. 436-5085; theatrefirst.com

THE INEVITABLE examines Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the presidency the most fascinating event during the 2008 presidential campaign. I believe the roots of Clinton’s failure were psychological. She began the campaign believing her nomination and election were certain and, therefore, lost touch with her primary intention. Once the bubble of inevitability burst, Clinton faced an external and internal crisis. She had to reorganize her political campaign and get her head straight. As Clinton struggled to get her political act together, warring instincts within her own personality battled on stage. By the time this conflict was resolved, Clinton had become the effective candidate many of us expected, but it was too late for her to overcome Obama’s delegate lead.

The INEVITABLE is directed by Ann Brebner and features Joy Carlin as Eleanor Roosevelt plus actors from the PORCHLIGHT Theatre Company.

The Berkeley Historical Society greets the fall with a flourish this coming weekend with back-to-back town / gown events.

On Saturday, a walking tour of the edge of the 1923 Berkeley Fire.

On Sunday, an opening for a new exhibit of athletic and spirit memorabilia associated with the University of California.

Let’s start with the walking tour.

The 1923 Fire was Berkeley’s greatest—and most devastating—natural disaster to date. Several times in the history of the town wildfire has swept down from the hills, propelled by dry, blustering, winds from the interior of California.

In 1923 on September 17—87 years ago, this week—fire burst out of Wildcat Canyon and came over the ridge into the eucalyptus groves and brown shingle houses of the Northside neighborhood.

By the time the winds died down hours later some 600 buildings had been destroyed, including many of Berkeley’s most picturesque homes, and flames had licked at the edges of the UC campus and Downtown Berkeley.

While Berkeley quickly rebuilt, the character of the new buildings was different than before the Fire. Berkeley Historical Society stalwart Phil Gale, whose family goes back generations on the local scene, will lead his Saturday walk along the northern edges of the Fire zone showing surviving structural relics and pointing out the differences between pre and post-Fire development.

Information on how to sign up for the walk this Saturday, and the remainder of the fall Walks, can be found at the end of this article.

You can read more about the fire and its impact on the UC campus in this 1998 article: http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/0916/1923fire.html

On Sunday, September 18, the Historical Society turns its attention to a lighter, longer, topic. Local collectors Bart White and Keith Tower have put together an outstanding new exhibit showcasing decades of Cal spirit and sports memorabilia.

Both the curators are Cal alumni and both have been collecting for decades. Their finds range from material connected to the first Big Game (in 1892) to the birth of Oski, the loveable mascot.

“Golden Bear Pioneers: UC Sports & Athletic Traditions from Their Beginnings to 1945” opens with a free reception on Sunday at the Berkeley History Center in the Veterans Memorial Building, 1931 Center Street. The opening runs from 3 to 5 pm. There will be a brief introductory program, refreshments, and plenty of opportunity to look at the exhibit.

Read the take of local columnist Martin Snapp on the exhibit in his article, “Bullish on the Bears” at http://martinsnapp.blogspot.com/2010/09/bullish-on-bears.html

The remainder of the Fall Walking Tour program of BHS is listed below. Some of these tours reprise walks from past years, with guides who are familiar favorites for local historical audiences.

Saturday, October 9: “The Ghost Campus: UC Berkeley That Once Was” led by Bruce Goodell. Vanished buildings of the old campus, from old wooden Harmon Gymnasium to Cowell Hospital, still have a presence that will be articulated through the walk.

Saturday, October 23, “The Rise, Fall and Rise of West Berkeley”, led by Stephanie Manning. Oceanview is Berkeley’s oldest neighborhood, going back some 5,700 years to the coming of native peoples. The guide, who was both observer and participant in the resurgence of the neighborhood in more recent decades, will explain both ancient and more recent history.

Saturday, November 6, “West Berkeley Artisans” will feature a walk through the artist and artisan district of flatlands Berkeley, focusing on ceramicists, potters and glassblowers.

Saturday, November 20, “The Ed Roberts Campus”, led by Dmitri Belser. The Roberts Campus is the new center for independent living / disabled organizations nearly completed on the east parking lot of the Ashby BART station. It combines state-of-the-art design approaches to universal accessibility—including a dramatic ramp that serves as both a functional and sculptural element—and will be the consolidated headquarters of numerous local groups.

The “Bonus Tour” offered for those who purchase tickets for at least three other tours, is on Saturday, December 4. It’s entitled “Where Nostalgia Meets Innovation”, and is led by Deborah Badhia of the Downtown Berkeley Association. She’ll guide the group through Downtown, old and new, including visits to several current businesses.

Attending Walking Tours

All the walks start at 10 am and end around noon. They are generally limited to 30 participants, so sign up soon; they often sell out.

Tours cost $8 for Historical Society members and $10 for non-members. Members only have an opportunity to buy a season ticket for all six tours for $30. If you’d like to join BHS to get the season ticket, the basic membership cost is $20 for an individual, $25 for a family.

If you would like to sign up—particularly for this Saturday’s 1923 Fire Tour—the best way is to call the Historical Society at 848-0181. Leave a message giving your name, the number of tickets you are interested in, and your phone number and e-mail address if you have one.

If possible, call on Thursday or Friday between 1 and 4 pm when the History Center should be open and there will be volunteers on hand to take your reservation.

You can also pick up a tour flyer at the Center (1931 Center Street) and leave a reservation in person.

The History Center and its exhibits can be visited for free on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 1-4 PM.

(The Berkeley History Society does not currently have an updated website. Please visit the Center or call for further information.)

Steven Finacom is the First Vice President of the Historical Society. He has previously written for the Planet about its events and activities.

When I lived in the Southwest between ’66 and ’71, I attended a Ute sundance, many Pueblo Indian ceremonies and, when I worked on the To’Hajiilee reservation, many Navajo healing rites that few outsiders have ever seen. But I’d never been to a pow wow. The first pow wow I ever attended I also helped organize, on Berkeley Indigenous Peoples Day 1993.

It’s hard to believe that this year will mark our 19th annual pow wow. Little by little I’ve learned a few things about them. Pow wows are a place where Native people welcome non-Natives to come together, dance, sing, socialize with them, and honor Indigenous culture. There are dancing competitions, with prize money. Great Native food and crafts. The Berkeley Pow Wow has always been just one day, but some of the biggest ones continue for a full week.

On the first Berkeley Indigenous Peoples Day, back in 1992, we commemorated 500 years of Native resistance with ceremonies by Indigenous elders, but we didn’t hold a pow wow until our second year. I don’t recall whose original idea it was. I’ve asked around, but nobody seems to be able to trace it to one person. It might have been Millie Ketcheschawno, Muscogee, one of our group’s first members, an activist on Alcatraz and a filmmaker. It could have been Dennis Jennings, Sauk-and-Fox, our first pow wow coordinator and a Treaty Council activist. More likely it was many people’s idea, just floating in the air until the organizing committee pulled it down.

Many tribes trace pow wows back to their own periodic gatherings, large traditional celebratory feasts, usually after the fall harvest. The oldest continuous annual pow wow today is probably the Quapaw, now in its 138th year in Oklahoma. The term pow wow comes from an Algonquian word for a gathering of people, which began to be used in Oklahoma around 1900.

Diverse tribes have different stories about the origin of pow wow dancing. There are distinct northern and southern traditions. One commonly told origin story among southern tribes holds that the first pow wow dance was the Iruska, a dance of the Pawnee, taught to a man named Crow Feather by a group of spiritual beings who immersed their hands into boiling water and fire. Iruska means "they are inside the fire," but is often translated as "warrior." The dance is usually known today as the Warrior or Straight Dance. The beings held Crow Feather over hot coals, and after he survived, they taught him songs and the dance, and told him to teach them to the people. Then the beings turned into birds and animals and left. On a second night they returned and repeated the ceremony. At the end, one spiritual being stayed behind and taught Crow Feather to make many of the symbolic items worn today by male pow wow dancers. His “crow belt” is today the back bustle worn by Fancy dancers. His “roach headdress,” made from deer and porcupine hair, represents the fire ordeal: an eagle feather in a deer shoulder blade represents the man standing in the center of the fire; the bone also represents the medicine given to him.

In the early twentieth century the dance spread out of Oklahoma through the Great Plains north to Canada. Dance societies were formed in over thirty Plains tribes, and through the dance former enemies made peace. Pow wows gained momentum after World War II, when they were held as local honoring ceremonies for returning Indian veterans. In the mid-1950s many Native people began traveling between communities, dancing in pow wows and promoting Intertribal culture. But they weren’t very prominent until after the Alcatraz occupation of 1969-’71, when an intense intertribalism revitalized Native culture.

With time and many different tribes adding their individual characters to the dance, the Iruska took a variety of forms: Grass Dance, Fancy Dance, the Northern and Southern Traditional, and many more. At first women did not dance, but today have a wide variety of dances, including the Jingle Dance, Shawl Dance, and forms of the Northern and Southern Traditional.

Pow wow dancing today is based on spiritual values, the commemoration of warriors who struggled for their people, former enemies dancing together, peacemakers and peace, cultural survival and spiritual resurgence.

Part 2 of this series will appear next week.

This year Berkeley Indigenous Peoples Day Pow Wow and Indian Market will be held in Civic Center Park on Saturday, October 9, 10am to 6pm. Sponsored by the City, it is always free.

For those of you with a special spot in your heart for bats (not too many, I daresay), you should be pleased to hear of a September 21st meeting of the Berkeley Garden Club. On this occasion,the guest speaker will be Maggie Hooper of the California Bat Conservation Fund.

Her subject will be "A Celebration of Bats." This meeting will be held at the Epworth United Methodist Church, 1954 Hopkins Street, Berkeley at 2 p.m.

Bat Conservation International is conducting and supporting science-based conservation efforts around the world, helping to maintain healthy environments and human economies far into the future. It should be noted that no subject has generated more misinformation or fear about bats and rabies. Bats are neither rodents nor birds, and people cannot get rabies just from seeing them in an attic, in a cage, or at a distance. If you are bitten by a bat, wash the affected area thoroughly with soap and water and get medical advice immediately.

But bear in mind that bats are gentle, passive creatures that will bite only in self defense. They will NOT get in your hair; they're not interested in your hair! They help control pests and are vital pollinators and seed dispersers for control of plants.

In her presentation, Ms. Hooper will bring live bats that can be seen up close, and will give advice on how to build and set up bat houses and how to keep bats out of your own home.

So, for an illuminating discussion of a little known topic, we invite you to attend the September 21 of the Berkeley Garden Club, United Epworth Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins Street. Refreshments will be served. For further information, call Joe Eaton Publicity Chair of the Club F (510) 845-9039,